Brilliantly researched, imaginative cross-genre historical fiction.
A part fantastical ghost story, part romance focuses on Modigliani’s lover.
Paris, 1920: Italian painter Modigliani dies of consumption. Two days later, Jeanne Hébuterne, artist, model, and common-law wife of Modi, throws herself out the window of her parents’ home. Jeanne dies, but her spirit survives. Tethered to her body by an ethereal umbilical cord, she is prepared for burial in the artist studio she shared with Modi. As a ghost, no one hears her while she rails that the studio has been ransacked and Modi’s paintings have vanished. Her brother, André, collects her work but doesn’t find the piece she had not yet finished, the painting she was going to give Modi had he recovered. Modi had started a picture of her and their baby daughter but abandoned it. Jeanne took up the painting and added Modi’s figure but did not complete it before they both died. After her burial, Jeanne is no longer tied to her body and must navigate the afterlife, searching for Modi. Lappin’s striking afterlife creates a compelling secondary realm to the superbly researched, fleshed-out historical world in and around Paris. What could easily have been a biographical novel—one that ended with Jeanne’s death—is instead a far more intricate tale. The time periods include Paris, 1920; Vichy France under Nazi rule, 1941; and then another layer: 1981, when an art historian uncovers Jeanne’s work and journals. In this blend of world events, art history, and ghost story, one of the author’s greatest strengths is her worldbuilding. Death, from the very first page, is fully realized. The umbilical cord that initially connects Jeanne to her corpse is as “clear and stretchy as a jellyfish tentacle, and a bit sticky, like old egg whites. It shimmered like mother of pearl.” There are rules and a detailed bureaucracy in the world of the dead. One must have money to catch a train; the train has compartments based on class; and Jeanne must inquire about Modi’s whereabouts with the bureau, which is divided according to one’s religion. The book’s inventive afterlife is as vividly drawn as the streets of Paris.
Brilliantly researched, imaginative cross-genre historical fiction.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-947175-30-3
Page Count: 263
Publisher: Serving House Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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
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