A creative, thoughtful exploration of the interconnectedness of human relationships.
An unexpected—and unexplained—pregnancy upends the life of a 40-something woman.
Gloria isn’t prepared to become a mother again at 46. With her only daughter expecting her first baby, she’s “come to terms with being a grandmother before she was ready,” but she hasn’t accepted “being a pregnant grandmother.” Yet pregnant she is—and in very mysterious circumstances. It’s clear her husband isn’t the baby’s father, but Gloria is equally sure she hasn’t had sex outside of her marriage. The answer to her mysterious pregnancy appears to lie in a series of troubling dreams featuring a person who identifies herself as Earth Girl, a celestial being who has returned to Earth and lives in a famine-stricken, war-torn country at an unidentified time in history. In these vivid dreams, Gloria experiences Earth Girl’s rape (in passages that might be triggering for some readers) and subsequent pregnancy. But dreams invade reality when she herself becomes pregnant. Unsurprisingly, her husband and daughter (both lightly sketched) greet Gloria’s explanation for her pregnancy with skepticism and anger, but once baby Ella is born, they quickly come around. Ella is no ordinary child. And Gloria continues to experience strange dreams that suggest that her daughter has a higher purpose that could involve the fate of humanity. Greene’s debut novel tackles big questions about life, death, and the future of the planet. As Earth Girl tells Gloria, “Life on earth can never be fully understood. Life and all it holds is too big for humans to understand.” Suffering happens because “humans have embraced pain and sorrow much more fully than they have embraced joy.” It’s also a moving portrait of a family under stress, with Gloria and her husband, Jared, facing the challenges of raising a unique child, dealing with health scares, and confronting tensions with their adult daughter, Melanie. Greene makes a strong case for embracing nonviolence and protecting the planet, as Ella predicts “a future more bleak and disastrous for society than you can imagine” if we do not “pay attention to important things.”
A creative, thoughtful exploration of the interconnectedness of human relationships.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-78279-049-5
Page Count: 273
Publisher: Soul Rocks Books
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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