Grisham’s fans will enjoy these tales of betrayal, hope, and dysfunction.
Three Grisham novellas show the less glorious side of the legal profession.
In the first, Homecoming, Jake Brigance is a lawyer in a small Mississippi town with too many lawyers. One day, his office receives an envelope containing a note and enough cash for a one-week vacation to Costa Rica for Jake and his wife. All he’s asked to do is convey a message and relay the response. The offer/request is from Mack Stafford, an attorney who’d skipped town three years earlier with $400,000 of his clients’ money, leaving behind his wife, two teenage daughters, and clients who still don’t even know they’ve been bilked. Now he feels bad and wants to come home and reestablish contact with family. Will they want anything to do with him? No startling twists, but Mack is surprisingly sympathetic given what he’s done. In Strawberry Moon, 29-year-old Cody Wallace sits on death row for a botched robbery-turned-murder committed when he was 14. His brother had pulled the trigger on the homeowners and was killed in the shootout. Over the years, Cody’s lawyer has tried every legal trick and delaying tactic he could, and now it’s execution day. The only hope left is clemency from the governor. Meanwhile, Cody’s sole visitor has been his lawyer, although a Midwestern woman has corresponded with him and sent him books—lots of books. With execution imminent, he has one last wish that’s against prison rules and could get a friendly guard fired. The last yarn, Sparring Partners, features a most dysfunctional family of lawyers. Bolton Malloy is the disbarred head of Malloy & Malloy and is serving prison time for killing his wife, a most disagreeable woman whom no one misses. Rusty and Kirk, his two lawyer sons, despise each other as well as dear old dad, but their old man has forced them to sign an agreement never to leave the firm without paying a serious penalty. Bolton hopes to get out of prison soon, but the kids hope otherwise. So while the first two stories are touching, the last is anything but. You just want everybody to slither back under a rock—or maybe under separate rocks.
Grisham’s fans will enjoy these tales of betrayal, hope, and dysfunction.Pub Date: May 31, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-385-54932-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
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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