A piercing and infuriating tale that brings to light a historical cruelty too often kept secret.
In Fewer’s historical novel, an Irish family contends with the difficulties of immigration, early-20th-century medical misogyny, and broken dreams.
Brigid Kelly was once a lively, self-confident child who relished tending to her younger siblings in the small Irish town of Moling. But in 1892, when Brigid was 6 years old, the birth of Thomas, the family’s fourth child, brought about the tragic death of Brigid’s mother (“all light had been sucked from their warm, loving home and replaced with individual struggles to exist”). Five years later, Brigid’s father Patrick buckles to social pressure and marries Agnes O’Brien, a stern woman who rules the house and the children with an iron fist. Brigid, desiring a life larger than is available in their little village, decides she must find a way to leave. Opportunity comes in the form of Ben McCarthy, a local lad who shares Brigid’s aspirations of starting over in America. The two marry in 1908, and, with Brigid’s brother James in tow, they sail to New York. Brigid and Ben settle in Niagara Falls while James plants his roots in San Francisco. When Brigid becomes involved with a group of spiritualists, free thinkers, and suffragettes, she is shunned by the church, and the resulting loss of social position causes Ben to lose his job. The author alternates between stories of the siblings left in Ireland and those of the three immigrants, but it is Brigid’s painful tale of hope, determination, and an eventual mental unraveling that drives the narrative. The strongest of the four Kelly children, she is undone by a series of tragedies that are exacerbated by the era’s accepted medical mistreatment by a misogynistic doctor. With a sharp eye for detail, Fewer treats her readers to enjoyably lavish depictions of upper-class travel across the Atlantic and a portrait of San Francisco’s bustling rebirth after the famous earthquake; she applies the same meticulous attention to the frightening isolation of Brigid’s life in a mental institution.
A piercing and infuriating tale that brings to light a historical cruelty too often kept secret.Pub Date: March 12, 2025
ISBN: 9798888246078
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2025
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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