An ambitious novel that spans many forms, ably crossing oceans and centuries.
A polyphonic, multigenerational novel of the Japanese experience in America.
At the beginning of Yamashita’s latest, 17-year-old Yone “exchanges his kimono for Western attire” and, full of hope and ambition, sets off from Meiji Japan to the U.S. Elegant, learned, he finds himself washing dishes in the Bay Area. Things take a turn for the better when Yone, having become a famous poet, falls into the company—and beds—of admirers. After he returns to Japan, one of them turns up with a 3-year-old baby in her arms. Years pass and, again crossing the ocean, other Japanese land on American shores, farming, founding businesses, and becoming model citizens—until their hopes are dashed by racist laws. Some of Yamashita’s many narrative threads tend toward the fabulous, as with her shaggy-dog story of a Japanese man who lands in Mexico, dubs himself Storm, grows a thick “Mexican mustachio,” and—well, now a “Zen Zorro,” rides into a legend that “fits him like a glove.” Told in many voices and with a sprawling dramatis personae, Yamashita’s novel steps in and out of several genres in both Japanese and English: There are letters, poems, court transcripts, edicts, reproduced government documents, affidavits, footnoted historical extracts, and more. No matter how the text is constructed and where the characters are in space and time, injustice is a constant, not least in the fraught times when the title questions—distributed to Japanese in internment camps during World War II and demanding renunciation of any allegiance to Japan and its emperor—speak to a discrimination endured by no other people, at least not until the ICE age. “Answering yes-yes makes the game shorter, but you don’t necessarily get out or win,” Yamashita writes, demanding recognition of that injustice: “What happened will be remembered, and people will learn the lessons of the past.”
An ambitious novel that spans many forms, ably crossing oceans and centuries.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9781644453810
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
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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