A strong, stirring generational tale about a Russian family’s travails.
A second-generation Russian Jew travels to Moscow for a semester abroad in 1980 looking for answers about her family history in this novel.
Anna, a college student, knows very little family lore. She was told that her great-grandmother Zlata was raped and killed during the Russian Revolution. Later, Anna’s grandparents, who met and married in America, willingly returned to Russia with their little girls—Anna’s mother and her younger sister—then fled back to the United States. The book’s narration alternates among time periods: the protagonist in the 1980s; her great-grandmother and Zlata’s daughter, Sarah, in 1917; and Anna’s grandparents’ sojourn in Russia in the early 20th century. Sometime after Zlata’s death, Sarah reluctantly went to America at her uncle’s behest (her father had gone there years before and started a new family). Sarah married Leon Vitsky, they had two daughters, and during the Depression that shook their faith in capitalism, off they went to Russia. In the present, Anna falls in love with young Iosif Belonsky, whose great-uncle Victor, by an uncanny coincidence, was a longtime friend of Leon’s. It was Victor who urged Leon to return to Russia and do his part in building the new and glorious Communist state. During her semester in Moscow, Anna discovers details about her family that will change her life. The book’s dedication suggests that the novel is close to Bordetsky-Williams’ family history. She is an experienced writer, and that shows in the craft and the passion behind this story. Especially moving and painful is the faith that Victor, a true believer, places in the new regime. He paints a picture for Leon of a Communist paradise when in fact conditions are worse there than in developing countries. Sarah is appalled, and Leon finally breaks free of Victor’s spell. But Victor believes in the dream even as he faces Stalin’s firing squad. The fatal consequences of idealism have never been clearer. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss” has never been demonstrated more tragically. But readers get a vivid picture of ordinary Russians as warmhearted, giving people, making their plight all the more poignant.
A strong, stirring generational tale about a Russian family’s travails.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73284-804-7
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Tailwinds Press Enterprises LLC
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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
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