A moving story of friendship, family, and recovery.
In Peters’ novel, two very different Illinois women find unexpected strength and grace in each other.
Two months after her father dies, 53-year-old white Midwesterner Pauline Swanson becomes a hospice volunteer, thinking she can use the skills she learned while caring for him to help others. A sober alcoholic with no remaining family, she works as a bartender, lives frugally, and is consumed by regret about her behavior when she was young and troubled. Her first patient is Deborah “DeeDee” Deneaux, a 76-year-old Black businesswoman who has an advanced, incurable autoimmune disease. DeeDee initially rejects help, and she has a difficult relationship with her resentful son, Raymond, who arranged the hospice visits. Pauline persists, and as the two women get to know each other better, a true friendship blooms. Pauline is awed by DeeDee’s story of growing up in a close-knit family in New Orleans in the 1960s, training as a dancer, then going to San Francisco at age 18 with her brother, who joined the Black Panthers. Barely able to make rent as a diner waitress, DeeDee became an exotic dancer and stripper, then put herself through college as a single working mother. She tells her story proudly, which is a revelation to Pauline, who holds back details of her own past, due to feelings of shame. When DeeDee pleads for Pauline to take her out for one last night on the town, she reluctantly agrees, despite her worries about DeeDee’s weakening condition. Not long afterward, Pauline gets an unexpected reminder of a childhood trauma, and she faces a gut-wrenching decision.
The novel interweaves Pauline’s first-person, present-tense story and DeeDee’s, told in third person, past tense. Both women’s voices effectively convey their strong personalities; Pauline’s directness is often disconcerting to others, although her thoughts are much snarkier than her speech. DeeDee centers her New Orleans Creole heritage, sprinkling conversations with dawlin’ and bits of French; she affectionately calls Pauline “mon cygne.” Peters’ writing features apt descriptions—the senior living apartment building where DeeDee resides has “a cozy, almost Victorian vibe with a hint of Howard Johnson’s”—and lovely passages, as when Pauline imagines her own ashes after death: “I will dust the dreams of lovers, be a mote in the eyes of those who hate, grit the icy walkways to steady slippery steps, and choke the voices that lie and slander.” The characters are well-rounded and distinct; they’re sometimes blind to their own feelings but psychologically astute about others’; for example, DeeDee tells Pauline that Raymond “doesn’t so much try to mean well, as he likes to feel as if he tries to mean well.” The novel handles weighty themes frankly and with nuance, as when Pauline asks DeeDee how she survived racism and prejudice, and she replies, “Getting a kick out of your past-tense there, dawlin’.” Although her body is weakening, DeeDee remains as vibrant as ever, while Pauline’s perseverance, and her journey toward love and self-acceptance, are memorable throughout. A moving story of friendship, family, and recovery.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2025
ISBN: 9798998588402
Page Count: 504
Publisher: SmallPub
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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
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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