An accomplished, touching debut featuring moving insights into the mind of a sensitive teenage boy.
A 14-year-old finds comfort in botany while dealing with his younger sister’s illness in this debut YA novel.
As he enters his home in Newcastle, England, teenager Oliver Campbell is shocked to discover his 5-year-old sister, Lily, convulsing as his mother looks on helplessly. When Lily must be hospitalized, it upends Oliver’s family, which includes his half brothers, Nathan and Sam. It also changes Oliver’s day-to-day existence, which was usually spent hanging out with his word-nerd pal, Kamal, and crushing on a girl named Poppy Teasdale. She’s a year above him in school and works in her family’s garden shop. There, she and tongue-tied Oliver “usually ended up with little bursts of coded plant-speak.” As the novel progresses, he faces protracted agony, as well as a brief reprieve, regarding Lily’s mysterious condition, and a sympathetic nurse shares news of his pain and plight in emails to her own elderly mother. On a school trip to the Tate art gallery in London, Oliver almost decides to run away, but he’s stopped by a sage homeless man. He also overcomes his shyness in order to practice and then perform the role of Laertes to Kamal’s Hamlet in the school play—a part that perhaps hits a bit too close to home. By novel’s end, Oliver comes to new understandings with his neglectful mother and the elusive Poppy, who’s away in Australia during much of his family’s crisis. Best of all, he has some flowers in his family’s garden to soothe his suffering and loss. Debut novelist Johnston takes readers on a rich emotional journey in this contemporary YA tale, which she tells mostly from Oliver’s first-person perspective. Through his musings, she masterfully conveys both the inner angst and deflective banter of a struggling adolescent boy, which is by turns humorous and heartbreaking. The novel’s botany motif is sometimes a bit overextended, as even the nurse has the middle name of “Dahlia.” Still, the author largely uses this device to compelling effect—most particularly when she reveals the flower name of Kamal, Oliver’s well-developed sidekick.
An accomplished, touching debut featuring moving insights into the mind of a sensitive teenage boy.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481914253
Page Count: 286
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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