A richly informative but didactic tale about the clash of old and new in India.
An Indian activist and an American architect team up to take on an emerging right-wing movement in this debut novel.
Sompur, India. It’s 2005, and 30-year-old Meena Kaul is the director of Behera House, a women’s shelter with a mission to combat the country’s rampant domestic abuse. Meena is spearheading the building of a newer, larger campus for the organization, though this has caused some tension in her household, as her husband, Keshav Narayan—India’s leading sustainable architect—was passed over in favor of a Western designer. That Westerner is the American Simon Bliss, who is searching for redemption following an accident at one of his previous buildings. Dissatisfied with his own marriage, Simon becomes enamored with the brilliant and beautiful Meena before he even meets her. When an economic downturn causes Meena to lose her funding, she receives a proposal from an unexpected source. The right-wing Hindu Democratic Party offers a grant, though Meena suspects it is only doing so in order to gain traction among female voters ahead of a 2006 election. “There’s no way in hell we’re taking their dirty loot,” protests one of Meena’s staffers, “at least not while I’m here. It’s an ultra-right-wing cabal. If elected, they’ll destroy whatever progress we’ve made on women’s rights over the last hundred years.” Even so, Meena considers taking the deal. But Simon can see that they may be making a devil’s bargain. As it becomes clear that Behera’s patron, Madhav Behera—as well as Kesh—is increasingly in the pocket of the HDP, Simon and Meena must work to keep the shelter free from its grip—even if to do so means making enemies with some very powerful people.
Langer’s prose is lucid and wonderfully detailed, particularly when it comesto the architecture: “Suddenly four magnificent stone towers loomed ahead. Each façade consisted of vertical ribs curving inward and culminating in a mushroom-like stone cap. Deep horizontal spaces cut across the ribs, giving the impression that the tower was made up of a thousand sheets of paper, each suspended by a thin layer of air.” The novel does an excellent job showing the dangers faced by women in certain traditional societies as well as the platform and political strategies of the HDP. But in purely narrative terms, the book is a bit underwhelming. The plot moves quite slowly—as one might expect of a story that focuses on the less-than-thrilling world of non-governmental organization grants—and the romance at the center of it feels rather forced. Meena, the obvious protagonist of the tale, takes a back seat to Simon (and, to an extent, Kesh), diluting the work’s feminist message. Indeed, the very presence of Simon as a co-protagonist is perhaps a fatal flaw in the story’s conception. Readers will certainly learn a lot from this volume—Langer is extremely successful at bringing the time and place to vivid life—but beyond that sense of transportation, this is not much joy to be found here.
A richly informative but didactic tale about the clash of old and new in India.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 327
Publisher: Dryad Press
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2020
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
A tart meditation on narrative and integrity.
A writer’s meeting with his mentor goes complicatedly awry.
Lerner’s slim fourth novel opens with an unnamed narrator arriving in Providence, Rhode Island, on a magazine assignment to interview Thomas, a professor who’s “among the world’s most renowned thinkers about art and technology.” Just before leaving his hotel, though, he accidentally knocks his phone in a sink, bricking it. His sole means of recording the interview gone, he triages, suggesting that he and Thomas conduct a pre-interview that evening and do a full-dress conversation the next day, after he can get the device fixed. The setup seems thin, but, this being a Lerner novel, rich ethical and philosophical questions fly off it: He’s concerned with the ways that an interview poisons authentic conversation, with our over-reliance on technology, and the moral dilemmas of talking to an unreliable source. (Thomas, 90, seems distracted and sometimes dotty.) Lerner’s true subject isn’t an interview so much as it is misapprehension and miscommunication; after the meeting with Thomas in the first section, the second and third parts are concerned with characters’ failures to understand something about each other, be it a romantic partner’s wishes or a child’s eating disorder. That last challenge makes for some of the most vivid, offbeat, and affecting writing Lerner has delivered—a surprise, given his fiction is typically marked by DeLillo-esque sangfroid. Another surprise is the relative embrace of a conventional story arc, as the narrator faces a reckoning about living in a “deepfake” world. This is slighter fare for Lerner but surprisingly potent given its length, interested in the ways that we manufacture our identities and how technology speeds the process along.
A tart meditation on narrative and integrity.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780374618599
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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