Intense, uninhibited, at times overwrought, this bold debut is unlike anything you’ve seen before.
An Orthodox Jewish soap opera, for mature audiences only.
Like every other wife in her Southern California community, Rina Kirsch is “the invisible hero of the relentless Jewish calendar,” and Emerson’s debut gives a dire, almost furious sense of the cleaning, cooking, hosting, and gift giving this entails. Usually when you read pages and pages about food and cooking, it makes you hungry, but here the long lists of ingredients and dishes evoke not pleasure but the repetitive, draining female labor involved in their procurement and production. The pleasure center of Emerson’s debut is not food but sex, but even there the pleasure sometimes mingles with revulsion. As the novel opens in June 2011, the men in Rina’s husband’s circle have decided to permit themselves an evening of wife swapping: “It’s a thing that people do. It helps marriages last.” The swap is described in the graphic terms that are a consistent feature of this intensely carnal novel; think A Sport and a Pastime for Haredi Jews, and get ready for sentences like this: “Sometimes at home he would beat off while thinking about beating off at class to his mikveh fantasies.” In any case, being “traded” for an evening to another man is for Rina an indelible, unforgivable betrayal. Nine months later, she begins an affair with a rabbi and soon after she meets Will Ochoa, the teacher of an evening painting class her husband suggests she take. Rina and Will quickly realize that what is happening between them is real love, the kind that requires you to read Wallace Stevens’ “The Man With the Blue Guitar” out loud during intercourse, the kind that can cause a complete rupture with life as you know it. The plot continues to unfold at a breakneck pace, including vehicular trauma, unexpected pregnancy, religious conversion, life-threatening illness, and more, as the brute force and inexorable rhythms of orthodoxy thrum continually in the background.
Intense, uninhibited, at times overwrought, this bold debut is unlike anything you’ve seen before.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9781640096530
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.
A French art historian’s English-language fiction debut combines the story of a loving relationship between a grandfather and granddaughter with an enlightening discussion of art.
One day, when 10-year-old Mona removes the necklace given to her by her now-dead grandmother, she experiences a frightening, hour-long bout of blindness. Her parents take her to the doctor, who gives her a variety of tests and also advises that she see a psychiatrist. Her grandfather Henry tells her parents that he will take care of that assignment, but instead, he takes Mona on weekly visits to either the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, or the Centre Pompidou, where each week they study a single work of art, gazing at it deeply and then discussing its impact and history and the biography of its maker. For the reader’s benefit, Schlesser also describes each of the works in scrupulous detail. As the year goes on, Mona faces the usual challenges of elementary school life and the experiences of being an only child, and slowly begins to understand the causes of her temporary blindness. Primarily an amble through a few dozen of Schlesser’s favorite works of art—some well known and others less so, from Botticelli and da Vinci through Basquiat and Bourgeois—the novel would probably benefit from being read at a leisurely pace. While the dialogue between Henry and the preternaturally patient and precocious Mona sometimes strains credulity, readers who don’t have easy access to the museums of Paris may enjoy this vicarious trip in the company of a guide who focuses equally on that which can be seen and the context that can’t be. Come for the novel, stay for the introductory art history course.
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9798889661115
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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