Slow to start, but builds to an emotionally compelling climax.
The Spanish Civil War as it played out in the Basque region, chronicled from multiple points of view.
Debut novelist Zabalbeascoa’s decision to tell his story through a plethora of individual narrators perfectly captures the messiness of a civil war whose participants ranged from outright fascists, right-wing Catholics, and other conservatives aligned with Franco’s Nationalist rebels to the collection of anarchists, socialists, communists, and traditional democrats fighting for the Spanish Republic. This decision, however, also means that readers will need considerable time to discern the unifying thread involving Isidro Elejalde, a Republican soldier, and Mariana, who under the pen name Erlea writes impassioned pleas to her fellow Basques to join the fight to preserve democracy. Their anti-fascist salvos are eloquent, but Zabalbeascoa provides other perspectives as well. Some Nationalists offer standard tropes about godless rojos and “divine intervention on our side,” but more humane voices include a Nationalist guard who watches his fellow soldiers abuse helpless prisoners and thinks, “This isn’t why I fought,” and a nun who smuggles out a note from Mariana pleading for help after her newborn child is taken away to be given to “a mother and a father who have not fallen.” Nationalist atrocities are amply documented, but a wife-beating Republican and Isidro’s anguished confession after he shoots two teenage boys—“I’ve become the very thing I left home to fight”—make it clear there was brutality on both sides. The war’s deadly psychological toll is incarnated in a woman known as Have You Seen, who wanders the devastated countryside asking after the son everyone knows was killed months ago. As the Republican remnants straggle toward the border, Zabalbeascoa enlists Have You Seen to suggest tentative recovery from the wounds of war in a touching penultimate scene. Even the bleak final chapter describing the refugees’ chilly reception in France offers a glimpse of hope for the future.
Slow to start, but builds to an emotionally compelling climax.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781953387530
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 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
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.
A high school senior pursues an affair with her teacher.
Seventeen-year-old Waldo, the narrator of McCurdy’s fiction debut, lives in Anchorage, Alaska, with her mother, though she’s long been the parent in their relationship. She heats her own frozen meals and pays the bills on time while her mom chases man after man and makes well-meaning promises she never keeps. Waldo blows her Victoria’s Secret wages on online shopping sprees and binges on junk food, inevitably crashing after the fleeting highs of her indulgences. Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher, has “thinning hair and nose pores”; he’s 40 years old and married with a child. Nevertheless—or possibly as a result?—Waldo’s attraction to him is “instant. So sudden it’s alarming. So palpable it’s confusing.” Mr. Korgy professes to want to keep their friendship aboveboard, but after a sexual encounter at the school’s winter formal that she initiates, an affair begins. Will this reckless pursuit be the one that actually satisfies Waldo, and is she as mature as she thinks she is? Waldo is a keen observer of people and provides sharp commentary on the punishing work of female beauty. Readers of McCurdy’s bestselling memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died (2022), will surely be curious about the tumultuous mother-daughter relationship, and it is one of the novel’s highlights, full of realistic pity and anger and need. (“I want to scream at her. I want her to hug me.”) Unfortunately, the prose is often unwieldy and sometimes downright cringeworthy: When Waldo tells Mr. Korgy she loves him, “The words hang in the air in that constipated way they do when you know that you shouldn’t have said them.” Waldo frequently lists emotions and adjectives in triplicate, and events that could be significant aren’t sufficiently explored or given enough space to breathe before the novel races on to the next thing.
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593723739
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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