Hargrave’s lush, thoughtful novel underscores the way any sexual choice contains elements of both freedom and limitation.
A great love between two women is continually found, discarded, and rediscovered in this lyrical meditation on paths taken.
Erica and Laure meet on the steps of Sacré-Cœur in 1978 when the 18-year-old English tourist stumbles across the gorgeous Parisian reading and smoking. Before long they’re a pair, at least for the summer weeks that remain before Erica starts university back in Norfolk. Over the next three decades they’ll freeze each other out, engage in a torrid extramarital (at least for Erica) tryst, visit each other’s happiest homes, and finally extract some wisdom from their bond. In other words, Hargrave has written a big love story with occasional echoes of McEwan’s Atonement and Austen’s Persuasion—but with a spine stiffened less by pure longing and more by immediate loss. Erica fits in easily with Laure’s circle of friends, their ringleader a gay café owner named Michel who creates “a safe space, a place where gay men and women, transsexuals and bisexuals were welcome.” While passing years see increased acceptance of same-sex relationships, they don’t mitigate the complications Erica’s bisexuality brings, or the sheer tragedy of Michel’s death from AIDS. The author moves between descriptions of seedy squats (in one, Laure used a “glug jug” for midnight toileting) to places of peace and order, like Erica and her writer husband Anthony’s coastal home, underscoring both how unimportant luxury is to real intimacy and what a disguise it can be to its lack. Even when the two women experience deep connection, they distrust it, perhaps because they gave it up early in their relationship. Perversely, it’s in scenes free from sexual tension, like caring for Michel as he grows frail or enjoying the company of Erica and Ant’s young daughters, where the human longing for sexual communion stands out most clearly, as an urge toward life and creativity. Hargrave’s novel sounds a deep note of the consequences of ignoring one’s own heart and breaking the hearts of others.
Hargrave’s lush, thoughtful novel underscores the way any sexual choice contains elements of both freedom and limitation.Pub Date: March 24, 2026
ISBN: 9781668204276
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Summit
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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 debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.
A high school senior pursues an affair with her teacher.
Seventeen-year-old Waldo, the narrator of McCurdy’s fiction debut, lives in Anchorage, Alaska, with her mother, though she’s long been the parent in their relationship. She heats her own frozen meals and pays the bills on time while her mom chases man after man and makes well-meaning promises she never keeps. Waldo blows her Victoria’s Secret wages on online shopping sprees and binges on junk food, inevitably crashing after the fleeting highs of her indulgences. Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher, has “thinning hair and nose pores”; he’s 40 years old and married with a child. Nevertheless—or possibly as a result?—Waldo’s attraction to him is “instant. So sudden it’s alarming. So palpable it’s confusing.” Mr. Korgy professes to want to keep their friendship aboveboard, but after a sexual encounter at the school’s winter formal that she initiates, an affair begins. Will this reckless pursuit be the one that actually satisfies Waldo, and is she as mature as she thinks she is? Waldo is a keen observer of people and provides sharp commentary on the punishing work of female beauty. Readers of McCurdy’s bestselling memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died (2022), will surely be curious about the tumultuous mother-daughter relationship, and it is one of the novel’s highlights, full of realistic pity and anger and need. (“I want to scream at her. I want her to hug me.”) Unfortunately, the prose is often unwieldy and sometimes downright cringeworthy: When Waldo tells Mr. Korgy she loves him, “The words hang in the air in that constipated way they do when you know that you shouldn’t have said them.” Waldo frequently lists emotions and adjectives in triplicate, and events that could be significant aren’t sufficiently explored or given enough space to breathe before the novel races on to the next thing.
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593723739
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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