A by-the-numbers romp in the exotic.
An overstuffed coffer of silver yuan, renegade generals, general yearning, jeweled nail guards, and pilfered testicles.
China: The Novel may have all the marketing ring of Hot Dog...The Movie, but Rutherfurd’s formula over half a dozen period soaps remains constant: Take a historical period, populate it with dashing and dastardly characters, and go to town. Here it plays out in a tale full of Orientalizing clichés that would drive Edward Said to despair, from the obligatory “Confucius says” to yowling rebels dispatched by heroic Britons, with one such ingrate coming a cropper thanks to an expertly hurled cricket ball. “Shall I kill him, Grandfather?” asks the young lad who lobbed the googly. “I can chop his head.” Grandfather is a fellow named John Trader, who appears early in this century-spanning story as an ambitious lad who lives up to his last name shifting opium and tea. The stern Scottish general who inspects him in India, whose “eyebrows turned up at the ends so that he looked like a noble hawk”—think C. Aubrey Smith’s character in the 1939 film The Four Feathers, parts of which seem to have drifted into Rutherfurd’s imaginarium—eventually allows Trader into his demesne, but only after Trader loses an eye and thereafter projects a Lord Nelson–ish aspect. His remaining eye is firmly fixed on his beloved Agnes, who says pithy things like, “Have you had a good lunch?” Meanwhile, big doings are afoot: The European powers are carving out territories, contending warlords are mussing up the Confucian order, and, as the narrator of this part of the multipart saga tells us, “the clouds were darkening.” That narrator, the most interesting character in a book full of stick figures, is a eunuch who is not quite omniscient and certainly unreliable and who spends psychic energy engineering the disappearance of an enemy’s detached genitalia while faithfully serving an empress who’s not above voicing an authorial groaner: Asked about the practice of foot binding, she replies, “I’m going to take steps to end it.” Ouch.
A by-the-numbers romp in the exotic.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-385-53893-0
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
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
Great crime fiction.
An apparent suicide threatens to destroy an Irish farm town in the final volume of French’s Cal Hooper trilogy.
In the fictional western Ireland townland of Ardnakelty, “there’s a girl going after missing.” Soon young Rachel Holohan is found dead in the river. Shortly before, she had stopped at Lena Dunne’s home, and nothing had seemed amiss. The medical examiner determines she’d swallowed antifreeze, and he presumes she then fell from a bridge into the water. The medical examiner and the town agree she’d died by suicide. But there is far more to the plot: 16-year-old Trey Reddy thinks Tommy Moynihan murdered Rachel. Moynihan doles out favors and punishments to the local townsfolk, who know it’s best not to cross him. Now rumors spread that Moynihan wants land and has a secret plan to forcibly buy up parcels from the locals. A factory will be built, or a great big data center, or who knows what. If Tommy’s son, Eugene, can get elected to the local council, then compulsory purchase orders for land will follow, and the farms will disappear. Eugene, who’d been romantically involved with Rachel, is wonderfully described as “on the weedy edge of good-looking” and just fine as long as you “don’t have high expectations in the way of chins.” Lena is engaged to the American Cal Hooper, an ex-cop turned woodworker. They are “more or less raising” Trey, and these three core characters are drawn into the mystery of Rachel’s death and may have to face the looming clouds of civilizational change for Ardnakelty. Lena is chastised for “asking your wee questions all round the townland,” and Trey wants to quit school, against Cal’s advice. Finally, the story’s best line: “You can’t go killing people just because they deserve it.”
Great crime fiction.Pub Date: March 31, 2026
ISBN: 9780593493465
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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