A story of a small-town priest’s struggles with some intriguing characterization but uninventive plot resolutions.
A pastor struggles with anxiety, overeating, and curmudgeonly parishioners in Bourque’s novel.
Father John Brennan of St. Michael Parish in the well-to-do town of Belleview has struggled with emotional eating from an early age. His clothes are starting not to fit, and he hides in his car to eat doughnuts and McDonald’s when stressed. When he realizes that his anxiety has become unmanageable, he goes to pastoral care, where he unpacks his relationship with his roommate, Jim, a priest who eats the same amount of food as he does but doesn’t gain weight. As Father John gets more involved in the lives of those in his parish, he learns to fill the void within himself with friendship instead of food. In one enlightening chapter, a nun in the parish tells him, “You’re fat…and all I know is men like you don’t bring healing and reconciliation like you have.” Father John doesn’t take offense but instead offers a listening ear as she reveals her own trauma involving her father, and he opens up about his own battle with anxiety. One difficulty that Father John must overcome is finding a way to fix the church school’s cafetorium ceiling while also navigating the miserly ways of the parish finance committee chair; this adviser, Ben, is also his personal trainer, and the dynamic between these two characters is compelling throughout. However, the narrative stakes of their relationship feel very low; one major issue between them is solved simply by an earnest apology, and Father John’s reflection afterward feels unnecessary to state: “God put me in this situation to be a help to Ben and…Ben is here to help me take on more of my responsibility as a Pastor.” Over the course of the narrative, Father John’s problems regarding his eating disorder, his anxiety, and his issues with the parish’s finances are solved with God’s grace; this tidiness will satisfy some readers, but for others, it may feel like a lack of tangible narrative stakes.
A story of a small-town priest’s struggles with some intriguing characterization but uninventive plot resolutions.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9798895320761
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Parson's Porch Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2026
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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