An often pleasant, if somewhat lengthy, Oregon-set novel of trees and family.
A widower and a divorcée shake up a wealthy Oregon family in Crew’s literary novel.
In 2009, the members of the Garland family are bigwigs around Corvallis, Oregon, as the wealthy owners of Garland Forests, a major timber supplier. Will Trask is the humble son of a logger who married into the family and now works as a timber consultant and realtor. Since the death of his wife, Shelley, he’s done his best to raise their sons, Gar and Cody, though he feels like he’s lost touch with the teens. Now Gar is off to college, and Will is feeling increasingly adrift. Bridget Garland—who, like Will, married into the extended Garland clan—is a physical therapist known locally as “the Good Witch.” She’s recently decided to leave her cheating husband, John—which may mean severing ties with his powerful family: “They may own the forests, but they don’t own this town,” Bridget tells Will. “Corvallis is my town too, now. And the part of my life I’ve loved is right here.” But when Bridget enlists Will to help her go up against their in-laws, the entire family gets entangled in a mess of secrets and real estate. Crew’s prose flows smoothly across the page, inflected with wonderful details about the forests that form the backdrop of her characters’ lives, as when Will reflects on a comment to a real estate client: “ ‘Trees just get big fast here.’ More complicated than that, but Will didn’t feel like explaining….[P]eople who didn’t know just looked at a big tree and had no idea the size of the true old growth forests of the past.” The plot is slow-paced, and relatively few dramatic events disrupt the overall placidity. That said, Crew constructs her characters with such care that readers will be largely content to follow them through the intricacies of their relationships. At around 400 pages, the novel is perhaps a bit too long, but the author uses the space to grapple with the ins and outs of grief, new love, and old rivalries.
An often pleasant, if somewhat lengthy, Oregon-set novel of trees and family.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2020
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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