Despite the book's unwieldy structure, it shows Fakih as a gifted chronicler of children's helplessness and familial angst.
A young girl growing up in 1960s Iowa learns that grown-ups are rarely what they seem.
The Castle family name once meant greatness—or, rather, a particular sort of Midwest greatness, when their seeds were sold all over Iowa and their name adorned signs and silos everywhere they looked. But the Castle family of the 1960s, as seen through the eyes of the middle child, narrator Kimmy, no longer lives in the big house on the hill that they still drive by every Christmas Eve. Instead, Mr. Castle is a church deacon and a mortgage broker with a scotch- and cigarette-loving wife and three children: plump, bookish Kimmy, older brother Paul, and little Nellie. While the book is labeled a novel, it reads much more like a collection of linked stories or personal essays, its string of vignettes taking place mostly during Kimmy’s tween years. They recount Kimmy’s eyes first opening to the rules and constrictions that govern the lives of the adults around her, from the gym teacher who unleashes his cruelty upon two of Kimmy’s classmates to Kimmy’s cadre of grandparents and extended family in Des Moines. Though many of these figures appear in lower-stakes anecdotes (such as the disappointment Kimmy experiences when family friends skip out on a shared holiday tradition to stay at home with their new color TV), the book’s main throughline shows how catastrophic the secret world of grown-ups can truly be on the delicate web that is a family. Fakih’s book, her first for adults, will appeal to anyone who looks back on their own childhood with a mixture of nostalgia and horror.
Despite the book's unwieldy structure, it shows Fakih as a gifted chronicler of children's helplessness and familial angst.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-953002-20-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
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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