An intelligent but rambling friendship tale set in Jerusalem.
In this novel, two Jewish childhood friends grow up together in Jerusalem after the Six-Day War, with their devotion to each other challenged by divergent cultural backgrounds.
Ben Haddad and Ofir Stern are best friends in Jerusalem during a politically tumultuous and uncertain time that accentuates cultural divides. Ben’s background is Sephardic and Ofir’s is Ashkenazi—the former group is known for its religious devotion and political conservatism, while the latter is famous for its intellectual sophistication and progressive liberalism. The two groups often find themselves at cultural loggerheads, with the Sephardi routinely feeling disenfranchised and discriminated against by the generally more financially well-off Ashkenazi. Ben and Ofir’s friendship weathers the typical boyhood rivalries over girls and academic honors, though each set of parents views the other with suspicion, a tension that particularly haunts Ben. In the wake of college—Ben becomes a computer scientist and Ofir, an economist—they found a company together, Handex, which produces robotic arms designed for medical purposes. But Ben can never cease to view Ofir not only with the envy of a competitive brother, but also with mistrust, and he begins to embezzle money from the company in order to support a lavish lifestyle. This crime becomes a profound source of shame for him and a catalyst that compels the two to embrace the distance between them, an emotional drama intelligently depicted by Barasch Rubinstein. The author announces her aim to capture the conflict between the Ashkenazi and Sephardic cultures in a prefatory note, and she achieves this with impressive lucidity and thoughtfulness. In addition, she does a marvelous job of bringing to vivid life the political and cultural landscape of Israel during terribly turbulent years. But the plot eventually becomes a bit desultory and sluggish—it seems to meander in search of more opportunities to display the cultural opposition that permeates the tale. Ultimately, the author seems more interested in didactically teaching readers about an element of Israeli life than crafting a compelling story.
An intelligent but rambling friendship tale set in Jerusalem.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9798887195056
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Academic Studies Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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
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