A historical novel that merrily dances and jukes its way across the pitch of time.
Gilbert Chevalier, the (fictional) Haitian-born hero of the 1950 U.S. World Cup soccer team, recounts the story of his brief, mostly charmed life while at death’s door.
Gilbert, “aka Gil the Voodoo Child, aka Kid Haiti, aka Le Walking Heartbreak…Le Savoir,” is several years removed from shocking the world with his game-winning goal during the U.S. team’s upset of heavily favored England when he faces a firing squad in Fort Dimanche, “the worst place to be in Haiti.” His execution day climaxes years of imprisonment under the brutal dictatorship of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, among whose lovers is Gilbert’s estranged wife, Elizabeth, the daughter of an exiled Nazi. As you can tell, Gilbert’s life is complicated; there are many women, including the love of his life, Aurélie, who was engaged to Gilbert’s brother when he began his romance with her shortly after marrying Elizabeth. By that time, Gilbert is a soccer prodigy who must forsake the Beautiful Game when he leaves for New York City in the late 1940s to study economics. While there, he rooms with the already celebrated trumpeter Miles Davis and learns much about life, love, money, and the varieties of American racism clotting the streets like weeds. Football rudely reenters Gil’s life when a soccer ball slams into his face as he’s walking through Central Park. He starts playing his way back to his youthful virtuosity and, though he never becomes an American citizen, he is recruited to join a patchwork Team USA for the 1950 World Cup competition in Brazil, where fame and still more complications await, leading to his fateful run-in with Papa Doc. Inspired by the real-life saga of soccer legend Joe Gaetjens, this follow-up to Léger’s debut novel, God Loves Haiti (2015), plays fast and loose with chronology, conflating historic personalities and events so much as to flirt with flagrant anachronism. Yet, like its predecessor, the novel moves with lyrical, imaginative force, especially in its vivid evocations of soccer play, while also showcasing the author’s penchant for orchestrating funny and poignant romantic interludes.
A historical novel that merrily dances and jukes its way across the pitch of time.Pub Date: May 12, 2026
ISBN: 9780374619886
Page Count: 240
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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