A straightforward family story written with a poet’s sensitivity and flair.
Based on the life of the author's Sephardic grandmother, complete with real names and photographs, this generational saga traces a family's journey of exile.
The novel is divided into three sections set in different places: There’s early-20th-century Constantinople, where prosperous Jews, Christians, and Muslims intermingle easily and where Rebecca Cohen lives as a child; Spain, where her family reluctantly immigrates in 1925; and the United States, where Rebecca eventually settles but never feels at home. Rebecca’s happy childhood ends abruptly in 1914 when the French-speaking Catholic school she attends abruptly closes and the previously oblivious 12-year-old becomes aware that war has broken out. Her best friend immigrates to America; Rebecca’s family is increasingly less prosperous. Ten years later, her father is financially ruined, and his beloved Turkey has become as intolerant of Jews as of Armenians and Greeks. Offered a low-level job at a small synagogue in Barcelona, he moves Rebecca’s family (minus an older sister who’s left for Cuba) to Spain, the country their ancestors fled during the Inquisition. Rebecca builds a successful dressmaking business there but, afraid of spinsterhood, rushes into marrying the only Jewish bachelor available and suffers in a deeply unhappy marriage. Her husband dies shortly after the birth of their second son. Although world events remain mostly in the background, rising fascism casts its shadow. In 1934, Rebecca accepts an invitation from her older sister, now living in New York, to marry the widower of an old friend who'd died in childbirth in Queens and immigrate to America. Yes, this sounds like soap opera, or a somber The Brady Bunch, as Rebecca and her new husband blend her sons, his daughter, and the children they bear together into one family. This longer final section lacks the novel’s earlier vibrancy, perhaps because writing about people she personally remembers constrains Graver. That’s too bad, because in imagining places (including a dreamy Cuba) and people from earlier times, Graver’s poignantly elegiac prose often soars.
A straightforward family story written with a poet’s sensitivity and flair.Pub Date: April 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781250869845
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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
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