A model of historical literature that combines scholarly rigor with subtle characterization.
In Rodrigues’ novel, largely set in the early 19th century, two prominent Portuguese intellectuals struggle to spread ideas of liberty while opposed by powerfully illiberal forces.
As a teenager, Joseph Correia da Serra fell deeply in love with Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel, a Portuguese noblewoman who was also a firebrand poet and intellectual. They planned to marry, but then Joseph suddenly left her; due to his father’s financial distress, he thought it more prudent to pursue a religious career offered to him with the support of the Duke of Lafões. Eleonora is devastated, but she goes on to become a notable author and the librarian to Carolina, the queen of Naples. But as Eleonora’s political views become more aggressively revolutionary, Carolina’s become more conservative. Eleonora finally becomes a fully committed Jacobin and the editor of the progressive republican newspaper Il Monitore Napoletano, and she’s arrested for her views in 1799. Decades later, Joseph, now in his 60s and famous for his achievements as a botanist, discovers Eleonora’s memoirs in Thomas Jefferson’s library while visiting his home in Virginia. Rodrigues conveys this emotionally gripping and philosophically lively story in two formats: Eleonora’s remembrance right before her execution, and Joseph’s conversations with Jefferson. Eleonora is effectively painted as a tragic figure; after Joseph left her, she endured an abusive marriage, and she paid a steep price for her political convictions. Joseph is shown to have never quite recovered from their separation; in fact, he devoted himself to his intellectual life at the expense of his emotional one: “I had split myself in two: I had crushed the emotional side of me, the part that had loved a young Portuguese woman with dark, contemplative eyes. The root of my spiritual alienation, if I could call it that, lay in this division.” The author’s research is impeccable, but her novel offers much more than historical edification; it’s also a riveting work of great psychological complexity.
A model of historical literature that combines scholarly rigor with subtle characterization.Pub Date: July 21, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 198
Publisher: New Academia Publishing/ The Spring
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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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