A probing, astute portrayal of a fraught and late-blooming coming-of-age.
After her husband is killed in a car crash, a recently married lawyer learns he was involved with another woman for years.
And it’s someone she works with! This disgusting detail is just one piece of an avalanche of bad news that tumbles down on poor Ellie Huang in the first chapters of Lin’s debut. By the time she learns that her husband, Ian Anderson, a lawyer of less skill and brains but significantly more social elbow grease than she, was screwing this other woman even before he proposed marriage, she’s reeling. It’s then that a piece of somewhat better news arrives—Ian had life insurance based on a forecast of his future earnings, and Ellie is the sole beneficiary. In addition, her supervisor at work really thinks she needs to take some time off, as her sentences have stopped making sense. Her best friend, Mable Chou, who has been staying over at Ellie's house every night since the accident, strongly recommends therapy. She could pay off the house, but does she even want to live there anymore? Ellie decides to put her windfall to use flying Mable and herself first class to Nice, and then on to the ultra-luxurious Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes. This premise sounds like fun, but Lin’s protagonist is no merry widow, and her narrative takes things in a more serious direction. At the resort, Ellie and Mable make friends with a somewhat mysterious couple—the man Asian like them, the woman White. Long-standing flaws in the friendship are exposed by their differing reactions to Robbie and Fauna as well as by Ellie's choppy processing of her complicated grief and rage. (Mable’s right—she really does need therapy.) Lin's treatment of the glamorous, decadent setting, with its stream of gourmet meals and artisanal cocktails, is far from escapist wealth porn—she has complicated things to say about privilege and its intersection with race, ambition, and identity.
A probing, astute portrayal of a fraught and late-blooming coming-of-age.Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: 9780063241435
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
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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