Even when she dials down the intensity, Jones is capable of quiet astonishment.
A surprising, welcome gift from one of America’s finest and least predictable writers.
This chronicle of a Black GI’s return to the American South after World War II provides Jones with the occasion to kick back and gently unravel the story of Buddy Ray Guy, an erstwhile Army cook and tractor repairman, who’s on something of a quest to find the book’s eponymous “Unicorn Woman,” whom he first beholds, albeit from odd angles, at a carnival near his hometown of Lexington, Kentucky. Though he can see the “spiraled horn” protruding from the woman’s forehead, Buddy is just as astonished by the “slender, dimpled arms [that] were the color of my own” since he’s more used to finding “white freaks” at carny sideshows. From then on, the enigmatic woman stalks Buddy’s dreams as he makes his way from Kentucky to Memphis, trying to parlay the mechanical skills he picked up in the military into a full-time civilian living in a postwar America still tethered to racial segregation. When Buddy confesses his obsession with the spiral-horned woman to Esta, his sometime girlfriend, she chalks it up to Buddy’s wildly romantic imagination: “You are more of a freedom seeker…than a unicorn seeker, Buddy Ray,” she tells him. “I don’t know whether freedom seekers are ever truly satisfied.” Nevertheless, not even the vicissitudes of Jim Crow America can keep Buddy from following through on his dreams, whether they involve conversing with the elusive unicorn woman or figuring out how to make the best use of his craft. All the while, Jones weaves a captivating tapestry of African American life in the 1940s from Buddy’s dreams and the wide-ranging information he collects on his quest throughout the mid-South from friends and relatives. He keeps his eyes and ears open to all manner of input, whether it comes from fragments of an Amos ‘n’ Andy radio broadcast or from the folk wisdom he gathers at restaurants, homes, and places of worship. Most of all, it’s Buddy’s narrative voice—digressive, reflective, witty, and wise—that sustains one’s attention and affection throughout this warm, savory evocation of the elegiac, the fantastic, and the historic.
Even when she dials down the intensity, Jones is capable of quiet astonishment.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9780807030035
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
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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