A thoughtful, engrossing first novel.
A choreographer getting her big break faces professional and personal complications.
Layla Smart has spent 33 years following her mother’s injunction not to fulfill stereotypical notions of what someone born poor and Black is like and what she can achieve. She’s worked in PR at the Brooklyn Academy of Music for nearly a decade while slowly building a career as a choreographer. She and husband Eli have been together for eight years, and although he not-so-covertly resents her determination to move on from a recent miscarriage, he declares himself thrilled at her opportunity to be choreographer-in-residence for nine months at Vermont’s prestigious Briar House. Layla is not thrilled to realize, in her first conversation with Briar House’s director, that she has been pigeonholed as “the next great hope of the Black dance canon” and is expected to create a piece about “everything happening in the world right now…The pain. The injustice.” That’s emphatically not Layla’s style; she claims the right to have diverse influences and to make dance that’s “abstract, more concerned with shape and musicality than specific themes.” As Morrow’s well-written debut moves forward, however, we see that Layla’s resistance to stereotyping may be holding her back artistically. The abrupt replacement of one of her dancers is the first indication that there’s a lot going on under the surface at Briar House, and there will be more. Layla shares the author’s personal background in dance studies at Connecticut College and PR work at BAM, to the benefit of absorbing scenes chronicling the development of her Briar House piece and a smart understanding of how the media operates, demonstrated by the key role a New York Times article plays in the cleverly plotted denouement. But this is more than autobiography transplanted into fiction; psychologically astute portraits of Layla’s evolving relationship with Eli, her mother, and her past make her decision at the end to choose fresh artistic and personal paths well earned and satisfying.
A thoughtful, engrossing first novel.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9780593736753
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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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