Ward may not tell you anything new about slavery, but her language is saturated with terror and enchantment.
This intensely wrought tone poem stalks an enslaved girl’s tortuous passage through the human-made and natural perils of the antebellum Deep South.
Ward follows her award-winning Bois Sauvage trilogy (Where the Line Bleeds, 2008; Salvage the Bones, 2011; Sing, Unburied, Sing, 2017) by moving away from her native Mississippi and back in time to the rice fields of pre–Civil War North Carolina, where Annis, a bright young Black woman who has learned from her mother, enslaved like her, that the white man who owns her is also her father and his daughters (on whose school lessons about Aristotle and the social habits of bees she eavesdrops) are her sisters. Annis’ mother enhances the younger woman’s education with lessons in self-defense and survival tactics she carried with her from Africa, where, as she informs her daughter, her mother was a warrior queen. Annis will need all this inherited cunning and resilience after her “sire” sells her mother. Away from her chores, Annis finds solace from her lover, Safi, the bees carrying out their own chores in the nearby forest, and words from a poem about an “ancient Italian” descending into hell as intoned by her sisters’ tutor. After Safi flees the plantation, Annis and other slave women are herded like cattle and sent off on a long, grueling march further south. Along the way, Annis has her first encounter with a dynamic woman spirit bearing the name Mama Aza, an imperious and enigmatic guardian angel guiding and protecting Annis from the more malevolent spirits that endanger the women’s lives en route to the slave markets of New Orleans, which Annis likens to the “grief-racked city” of Dante’s poem. There’s little that Ward’s narrative contributes to the literature of American slavery in its basic historic details. But what gives this volume its stature and heft among other recent novels are the power, precision, and visionary flow of Ward’s writing, the way she makes the unimaginable horror, soul-crushing drudgery, and haphazard cruelties of the distant past vivid to her readers. Every time you think this novel is taking you places you’ve been before, Ward startles you with an image, a metaphor, a rhetorical surge that makes both Annis and her travails worth your attention. And admiration.
Ward may not tell you anything new about slavery, but her language is saturated with terror and enchantment.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781982104498
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
SEEN & HEARD
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.
A love story about a life of second chances.
In Nassau, in the Bahamas, casino detective Vincent LaPorta grills Alfie Logan, who’d come up a winner three times in a row at the roulette table and walked away with $2 million. “How did you do it?” asks the detective. Alfie calmly denies cheating. You wired all the money to a Gianna Rule, LaPorta says. Why? To explain, Alfie produces a composition book with the words “For the Boss, to Be Read Upon My Death” written on the cover. Read this for answers, Alfie suggests, calling it a love story. His mother had passed along to him a strange trait: He can say “Twice!” and go back to a specific time and place to have a do-over. But it only works once for any particular moment, and then he must live with the new consequences. He can only do this for himself and can’t prevent anyone from dying. Alfie regularly uses his power—failing to impress a girl the first time, he finds out more about her, goes back in time, and presto! She likes him. The premise is of course not credible—LaPorta doesn’t buy it either—but it’s intriguing. Most people would probably love to go back and unsay something. The story’s focus is on Alfie’s love for Gianna and whether it’s requited, unrequited, or both. In any case, he’s obsessed with her. He’s a good man, though, an intelligent person with ordinary human failings and a solid moral compass. Albom writes in a warm, easy style that transports the reader to a world of second chances and what-ifs, where spirituality lies close to the surface but never intrudes on the story. Though a cynic will call it sappy, anyone who is sick to their core from the daily news will enjoy this escape from reality.
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780062406682
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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