An intimate, insightful, intricately rendered story of intergenerational trauma and love.
A Jewish woman escapes from Germany with her husband and baby daughter on the cusp of World War II. Decades later, can her granddaughter escape the lingering effects of her family’s trauma?
A terrifying knock on the door. A pounding heart. A woman clutches her baby in the dark, seeks out the “reassuring shape” of her sleeping husband, then thinks, “They will take him, too. They’ll take all of it, everything and everyone she has ever loved. In an instant. A flash.” Fox’s partly historical novel about a German Jewish family riven on the cusp of the Holocaust begins with this nightmare. While readers are immediately reassured that, for the woman, Annelise, fear will recede and life will go on, a sense of foreboding shadows this bittersweet intergenerational tale of love and trauma, casting it in poignant chiaroscuro. Fox’s novel—subtle, striking, and punctuated by snippets of family letters—tracks Annelise, who works alongside her devoted, kindhearted parents in their family bakery in a small German city, from first love to first heartbreak to marriage to motherhood. Against Annelise’s warm, quiet, tasteful domestic existence swirl the anger, ugliness, and brutality of growing anti-Semitism, ultimately crashing into it in the form of a brick thrown through a window. Annelise is lucky to escape to America with her husband, child, and a close friend. But although she is able to find safety and start a life in a new place with her young family, her parents are not so lucky. Cut to modern-day Milwaukee: Annelise’s granddaughter, Clare, is a young woman held fast by familial love, loyalty, and history as she struggles to move toward romantic love, independence, a sense of purpose. When Clare discovers a neglected cache of family letters and has them translated, she begins to see the invisible emotional scars she carries and to understand how the sadness and pain in her family’s past may be impeding her own future happiness. Fox has imbued this deeply personal, ultimately hopeful novel, which she explains in an author’s note is based on her own family’s story, with emotion, empathy, and an essential understanding of the complicated bonds between generations and the importance of reckoning with the past in order to embrace the future.
An intimate, insightful, intricately rendered story of intergenerational trauma and love.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-101-9478-07
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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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