There are genuine insights into human nature in this exhausting, sometimes overwritten deep dive into Tasmanian history.
Australian author Rose has written a historical novel about the island of Tasmania—largely settled by convicts transported against their will, along with other social outcasts—through the experience of one determined 19th-century settler, not a convict but a grieving widow starting her life over.
The only catch is that 23-year-old Caroline Douglas, who disembarks in Hobart with her nephew, Quill, was never married. She’s actually Caroline Colbert, and Quill is not her nephew but a 10-year-old cabin boy she purchased from a ship’s captain (who bought him from the boy’s father). Caroline has arrived from New York City, having previously fled London to avoid arrest for thievery, the lucrative career she took up after her French-born father, Jacques-Louis, a respected London apothecary, was convicted of murder in 1836. She’s moving to Van Diemen’s Land—soon to be renamed Tasmania—aware that he was shipped to the prison on nearby Norfolk Island. With the ambivalent hope of finding Jacques-Louis, who may or may not have gone mad, Caroline buys land and raises wine grapes. It’s not a coincidence that in pre-revolutionary France, before his parents met the guillotine, the Colbert family business was winemaking. If this seems like a lot of backstories, it is. Tying her earnestly researched history of the period to the origin story of one fictional family, Rose employs a surfeit of subplots, along with lessons in wine making and excerpts from poetry, primarily The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Expect several murders and sexual assaults, characters in multiple disguises, gratuitous cameos by historic figures, madness, villainy, and one rather thin romance. Caroline and Quill, who have an idyllic mother-son relationship, become close friends with their neighbors, the historically accurate Swanstons, and fictional Cornelius, a skilled blacksmith with secrets of his own. Although secondary characters border on two-dimensional good or evil, Caroline is a refreshing mix, continually weighing morality against ambition. Her absorbing consideration of the rewards and limitations of personal reinvention becomes the book’s great strength.
There are genuine insights into human nature in this exhausting, sometimes overwritten deep dive into Tasmanian history.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2026
ISBN: 9781668094914
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Summit
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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
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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