A mesmerizing, delicately crafted novel about survival in the wake of civil war and transpacific imperialism.
A multigenerational novel centered on a Korean woman who flees the South Korean dictatorship and immigrates to California in 1983.
The novel opens with a death and a marriage. Soon after her father is killed under the military dictatorship in South Korea, Insuk marries Sungho, a boy in her year at school. Sungho moves to San Jose not long after, leaving Insuk—now pregnant with a boy, Henry—behind with his difficult mother, Huran. A year later, Sungho sends for Insuk and Huran, and the whole family relocates to California. Insuk struggles with a difficult transition and befriends Robert, a Korean activist advocating for the reunification of North and South Korea. Snatches of conversation and throwback segments strewn throughout the novel impart snippets of modern Korean history, including the 1945 sinking of the Ukishima Maru, a passenger ship that exploded during a trip that was supposed to repatriate thousands of Koreans from Japan at the end of World War II; the 1980 Gwangju Massacre, which followed widespread protests after the South Korean general Chun Doo-hwan assumed power and imposed martial law; and the 1988 Seoul Olympics, when doves symbolically released for peace were burned alive by the Olympic cauldron. As the novel unfolds, the reader encounters various stakeholders' perspectives conveying what it felt like to live through these events. Quiet attention is paid throughout to the role of American imperialism in modern Korean history and the violence it has wreaked, but the novel's pedagogical elements never tip it into didacticism. Koh’s poetic prose delights with surprising metaphors and a cast of skillfully rendered characters.
A mesmerizing, delicately crafted novel about survival in the wake of civil war and transpacific imperialism.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781959030157
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2023
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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