A tense and fast-paced look at the many stories behind the Berlin Airlift.
Schrader’s historical novel follows the people fighting the Berlin Blockade.
In the third volume in her Bridge to Tomorrow series, the author concentrates on the year-long Berlin Blockade of the late 1940s, during which the Soviet Union thuggishly blocked rail, road, and water routes in and out of Berlin in an attempt to coerce the Allies into granting concessions. In response, American and British air forces conducted a massive campaign to make hundreds of thousands of air drops of food and fuel to the citizens of the beleaguered city. As Schrader’s novel opens, the Berlin Airlift is in full force and the Russian government is responding by clamping down more viciously on Berlin’s citizens while at the same time promulgating the idea of a “collective amnesty” that would allow briefly displaced Nazis to return to power in city government. The author’s canvas for this series of books is vast, but she grounds her story in a manageable cast of characters (some fictional, many historical) that she follows through the breakneck cut-and-thrust of the political and military events of the famed Berlin Airlift. The book includes maps and a handy preface orienting readers who may be coming to this installment without having read the previous volumes. With her usual deft blending of carefully researched history and well-crafted scene development, Schrader gives a sense of three-dimensional human life to an event that’s now all but faded from living memory. There’s occasional lazy, redundant writing like, “The Soviets released crumbs of information about the crash in dribs and dabs.” The lively character work (particularly in the case of Anna Savage, who’s distrusted by the Soviet authorities because she’s a Black nurse helping white patients) is the novel’s strongest element, keeping the reader fully invested right up through the dramatic climax.
A tense and fast-paced look at the many stories behind the Berlin Airlift.Pub Date: May 12, 2025
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Cross Seas Press
Review Posted Online: May 9, 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 debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.
A high school senior pursues an affair with her teacher.
Seventeen-year-old Waldo, the narrator of McCurdy’s fiction debut, lives in Anchorage, Alaska, with her mother, though she’s long been the parent in their relationship. She heats her own frozen meals and pays the bills on time while her mom chases man after man and makes well-meaning promises she never keeps. Waldo blows her Victoria’s Secret wages on online shopping sprees and binges on junk food, inevitably crashing after the fleeting highs of her indulgences. Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher, has “thinning hair and nose pores”; he’s 40 years old and married with a child. Nevertheless—or possibly as a result?—Waldo’s attraction to him is “instant. So sudden it’s alarming. So palpable it’s confusing.” Mr. Korgy professes to want to keep their friendship aboveboard, but after a sexual encounter at the school’s winter formal that she initiates, an affair begins. Will this reckless pursuit be the one that actually satisfies Waldo, and is she as mature as she thinks she is? Waldo is a keen observer of people and provides sharp commentary on the punishing work of female beauty. Readers of McCurdy’s bestselling memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died (2022), will surely be curious about the tumultuous mother-daughter relationship, and it is one of the novel’s highlights, full of realistic pity and anger and need. (“I want to scream at her. I want her to hug me.”) Unfortunately, the prose is often unwieldy and sometimes downright cringeworthy: When Waldo tells Mr. Korgy she loves him, “The words hang in the air in that constipated way they do when you know that you shouldn’t have said them.” Waldo frequently lists emotions and adjectives in triplicate, and events that could be significant aren’t sufficiently explored or given enough space to breathe before the novel races on to the next thing.
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593723739
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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