Enjoy the author's strong eye for details of time and place; skim the muddled pirate action on the high seas.
Issues of identity loom large in this tale of a female pirate whose journal becomes the research subject of a professor and her ambitious student.
Hannah Masury’s “Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates” tells a classic story: In 1726, the illiterate teenager witnesses the murder of a young sailor by pirates and knows she must flee Boston. Disguising herself as a boy named Will, she becomes cabin boy on a ship, only to find herself in the company of marauding pirates on their way to a tropical island where treasure is buried; to survive, she becomes a pirate, too. The journal’s existence proves that Hannah did survive, but is it, along with the treasure it describes, real? That’s the question Radcliffe Professor Marian Beresford tries to resolve two centuries later. Against her better judgment, and despite factual errors in Hannah’s version of history, Marian wants to believe that the journal her student Kay Lonergan has discovered is authentic. Marian finds backing for an expedition to search a crescent of islands Hannah mentions, but nothing works out as planned. Sometimes deadly earnest, sometimes sharply funny, the novel explores how women thwarted by circumstances shape-shift to fit in. Hannah, a starving girl in 18th-century Boston, finds some measure of security as a boy pirate, while Marian, a closeted 20th-century gay woman, lives with strict propriety as a spinster in Boston and occasionally escapes to the Mad Hatter, an actual gay club in 1930s New York. And obfuscating gender or sexuality is not the only tool of self-protection or -advancement the novel shows; Kay, described by Marian as "the heroine of her own imagination,” courts fame in the tabloid press with a canny mix of fact and exaggeration. In Howe's deliberately ambiguous narrative, authenticity is difficult to prove and not a clear absolute, in people or objects.
Enjoy the author's strong eye for details of time and place; skim the muddled pirate action on the high seas.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2023
ISBN: 9781250304889
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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
SEEN & HEARD
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.
A French art historian’s English-language fiction debut combines the story of a loving relationship between a grandfather and granddaughter with an enlightening discussion of art.
One day, when 10-year-old Mona removes the necklace given to her by her now-dead grandmother, she experiences a frightening, hour-long bout of blindness. Her parents take her to the doctor, who gives her a variety of tests and also advises that she see a psychiatrist. Her grandfather Henry tells her parents that he will take care of that assignment, but instead, he takes Mona on weekly visits to either the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, or the Centre Pompidou, where each week they study a single work of art, gazing at it deeply and then discussing its impact and history and the biography of its maker. For the reader’s benefit, Schlesser also describes each of the works in scrupulous detail. As the year goes on, Mona faces the usual challenges of elementary school life and the experiences of being an only child, and slowly begins to understand the causes of her temporary blindness. Primarily an amble through a few dozen of Schlesser’s favorite works of art—some well known and others less so, from Botticelli and da Vinci through Basquiat and Bourgeois—the novel would probably benefit from being read at a leisurely pace. While the dialogue between Henry and the preternaturally patient and precocious Mona sometimes strains credulity, readers who don’t have easy access to the museums of Paris may enjoy this vicarious trip in the company of a guide who focuses equally on that which can be seen and the context that can’t be. Come for the novel, stay for the introductory art history course.
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9798889661115
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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