An intense exploration of a complicated family.
Three generations of a Puerto Rican family deal with spiritual and interpersonal conflict in Engelman’s debut novel.
This sprawling story moves back and forth in time with various sections set in the 1920s, when a young boy in Puerto Rico named Rosendo is sold to a santera (a female Santeria priest) to participate in her rituals; the ’50s, as the Puerto Rican nationalist movement launches a doomed fight for independence; and the ’70s and, later, the ’80s, when Rosendo’s granddaughter, Esther, deals with the fallout of her parents’ dysfunctional marriage as her mother, Isabel, searches for answers through her own Santeria practice. Rosendo eventually frees himself from the santera’s abuse and ends up working as a day laborer who has little sympathy for his half brother Alberto’s enthusiasm for the independence movement. After Alberto goes missing, Rosendo rapes Alberto’s girlfriend, Paula; when she becomes pregnant, she and Rosendo are forced into marriage and move together to San Juan. A decade later, Alberto returns, and after getting the reluctant Paula and Rosendo involved in the periphery of the nationalist uprising, he convinces them to move to New York for a fresh start. Their story is interwoven with Isabel's increasing involvement in Santeria and Esther’s struggle to make sense of the unbalanced adults in her life. The book is steeped in Puerto Rican history and culture, and Engelman's vivid prose (“a clandestine, secret community, a family that transformed their jewel-box living rooms into festive drum circles”) brings the many descriptions of Santeria rituals to life. (The mishandling of Spanish last names is the only jarring note in an otherwise authentic cultural portrayal.) The story is bleak, with abuse and dysfunction passed down from one generation to the next, and although Esther and Isabel eventually land on a version of happiness, it is hard won. The book does an excellent job of capturing the essence of a community facing challenges from external and internal forces, and it delivers an intimate, emotionally resonant portrait of a complicated family.
An intense exploration of a complicated family.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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