A finely spun story of love and loss.
A young software engineer in Berlin is paralyzed by a stroke and falls in love with a woman conflicted about her sexual orientation in Silberstein’s novel.
In 2014, Anna Werner experiences a “horrible, life-altering, forever disaster” when she suffers a rare spinal stroke that renders her tetraplegic. She tenaciously labors to reclaim control over her body, but the progress is painfully slow. Making matters worse, her girlfriend, Julia, leaves her, and her doctor seems less than optimistic regarding her recovery. Distraught, Anna contemplates a release from the prison of her inert body through suicide. At the hospital, she meets Batul al-Jaberi, a Syrian immigrant working as a janitor who aspires to become a doctor. Batul is tenderly attentive to Anna’s needs, and the pair become close friends, their relationship flirting with the possibility of blossoming into more. In the moving, sensitive narrative, Batul requites Anna’s attraction but is profoundly uncomfortable with her own feelings, which are prohibited by the religious culture within which she grew up. “She was drawn to Anna. It was wrong. And it was safe. Because Anna would never be drawn to her, not in the same way, not with the same obsessive thoughts.” This is both a queer love story and a searching meditation on what happens when human longing is thwarted by an intractable reality. Silberstein’s writing is spare and economical; its simplicity is the source of its considerable power. There is no maudlin drama here, no breathless overstatement—with impressive restraint, the author plumbs the depths of these two fascinatingly complex protagonists and the deals they must strike with themselves in order to make their lives livable: “She loved her because she loved her. If she could heal her by trading places, she would not hesitate. If she needed her, she would do anything.”
A finely spun story of love and loss.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9781737351993
Page Count: 312
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2025
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
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.
Childhood friends, almost-sweethearts, a misunderstanding, and a funeral.
Blair Lang and Declan Renshaw were best friends who went on one date before a disagreement and an accident sent them in different directions after high school. Now Blair is back from college to be with her great-aunt Lottie, who’s dying, and to support her single mother in small-town Seabrook, California. Finding a job at a coffee shop puts her in the path of her former boyfriend, since he turns out to be its owner. Can the two get past their mistakes? The novel uses the popular second-chance romance trope, but Pham fails to energize it through interesting characters. Blair’s grief over her great-aunt’s death and her plan to help her mother are overshadowed by internal monologues about her feelings, the way her friends aren’t paying attention to her, and the novel she plans to write. Declan’s distinguishing characteristic, besides being a former high school quarterback, is his skill at building birdhouses. Unsurprisingly, the couple doesn’t have much chemistry; when they embrace, their “bodies meld like…memory foam.” The wooden characters, unusual word choices (“conglomerate of pedestrians,” “litany of plants”), and odd turns of phrase (“tension melting from his eyebrows like butter melting in a warm pan”) are almost enough to obscure the lack of plot development. What passes for stakes is easily defused when Blair comes into an inheritance that saves her from working as a consultant at Ernst & Young in New York—so she can write a romance novel.
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781668095188
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
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