“Some books are essential, others diversions,” the boy thinks to himself. This book belongs in the former category.
Delivering mail to remote Icelandic farms becomes a struggle for survival against the crushing forces of nature.
Three weeks have passed since the tragic incidents in Heaven and Hell, the first installment in Stefánsson’s Trilogy About the Boy. Now, in the second, the eponymous main character, who had planned to kill himself in despair after the accidental death of his friend, is finding a reason to live again in his village in northwestern Iceland. The unnamed, orphaned boy has found a new family with Geirþrúður, an older woman whose independence unsettles the village’s male leadership, and with the strays she’s welcomed into her stately home. Geirþrúður detects a sensitivity in him that’s unlike the men around her; she plans to give him a good education and help him make his way in the world. But first the boy is enlisted to help the postman Jens in the perilous task of delivering mail to remote farms in the frostbitten north. The pair find themselves trudging across wind-blasted heaths and mountains with zero visibility in the falling snow (“the sorrow of angels”). Each carries internal conflicts with him: Jens is afraid to admit his love for Salvör, a farmer’s maid with an unhappy romantic past; the boy feels sadness for his dead friend and attraction to a flirtatious shopgirl who’s leaving the village soon. Nature’s humbling power, Stefánsson suggests, gives sharpened clarity to those with troubled hearts. But the monotony of the pair’s endless trek is reflected in the excessively long account of their journey, which ends frustratingly with a literal and figurative cliffhanger that dangles many questions. Will the boy’s love of literature blossom into a writer’s career? Will he find happiness? Meaning? Love? Readers must look ahead to the final book for answers.
“Some books are essential, others diversions,” the boy thinks to himself. This book belongs in the former category.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781771966801
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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
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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