A captivating story of midlife renewal.
An alcoholic fights to reclaim her life while tending to a dying friend and young children in Thorndike’s luminous novel of recovery.
Fifty-seven-year-old anesthesiologist Ginny Thorndike is leaving rehab after overdosing on booze and pills following a downward spiral of addiction that broke up her marriage and got her medical license revoked. Helping her is her son Rob, who stays at her Sag Harbor, New York, cottage, flushes her stash, and distracts her from cravings. When he returns to his six-member group marriage at an Ohio commune, her other son Jamie and his boyfriend, Miles, fly up from Key West to continue the vigil, but the caretaking dynamic flips when Miles develops Lou Gehrig’s Disease. As the fatal neurodegenerative ailment worsens, Ginny, with nothing better to do, moves to Key West and helps Jamie with Miles: She feeds him, helps him use the toilet, wheels him to the beach, and develops an intense spiritual bond with him as death approaches. Duty calls again when Rob’s group marriage collapses and his wife Natalia gives birth to twins; she abandons the family, prompting Rob to summon Ginny for emergency baby care. The twins run her ragged but also reinvigorate her, and over several years she regains her medical license and starts a thriving relationship with a man. Thorndike makes Ginny a complex, prickly, conflicted heroine, ashamed of her sins, apprehensive about her future, adrift and in search of redemption. Her story provides a vivid study of the psychic fragility of recovery, conveyed in haunting prose that evokes the unappeasable power of alcoholic yearning. (“She’s afraid of how she’ll feel when she’s alone, at dusk, at seven at night, at eight and nine and ten. She wants to say, Don’t leave me.”) The result is a moving testament to the ways in which taking up the burdens of others can lift a heavy weight from the heart.
A captivating story of midlife renewal.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2025
ISBN: 9798992668216
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Beck & Branch
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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