A moving debut that honors the enduring power of love and reflection.
Pettiway’s haunting novel explores the generational trauma of racism through the story of a Black mother’s quest for justice, truth, and peace.
The story, framed by the 1949 funeral of 16-year-old Thad Butler, unfolds in the grief-stricken voice of his mother, Margaret, as she revisits the events that shaped her life—and ultimately, her son’s tragic fate. Told in a rich Southern vernacular, the novel stretches back to 1915, when Margaret was a 10-year-old girl growing up in New Harmony, South Carolina. As the daughter of Black sharecroppers, Margaret came of age amid stark racial hierarchies, grinding poverty, and gendered expectations. A pivotal moment arrived when she was invited to live in the “Big House” of the white Demmings family—a gesture of apparent kindness that concealed deeper power dynamics and exploitation. Through Margaret’s eyes, readers witness the tension between survival and dignity, love and injustice. Her friendship with White Candy, the plantation owner’s daughter, adds complexity to the novel’s portrayal of race and intimacy. As Margaret’s story winds through her adolescence, marriage, and motherhood, she tries to shield her children from the pain she carries from her past. However, when her child is murdered in an act of racist terror, she’s forced to confront the forces that shaped them all. Over the course of this novel, Pettiway’s richly voiced prose is lyrical and immersive, grounded in emotional precision and a tone of oral tradition. The narrative structure, which effectively interweaves past and present events, emphasizes the enduring weight of memory and trauma; as Margaret notes early on: “The threads of our lives—the decisions, dreams, and hopes that wove in and out, over and under each other—crafted my boy’s demise.” Overall, this is a story not just of loss, but of truth-telling, resistance, and the burden of inherited injustice.
A moving debut that honors the enduring power of love and reflection.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9798989182046
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Meishin Press
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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