Refreshingly tart reflections on family fragmentation and its aftershocks.
A finely detailed debut collection of stories set in Canada from the 1960s to the present.
Alward often begins in a sharply evoked past time and then swoops forward into the present to record the impact of a past experience on her characters. In the brief and evocative title story, she opens in the seemingly familiar territory of a party in the 1970s that is being observed by children exiled upstairs while “the grownups put on their party clothes and seemed to forget us.” In her bedroom, the narrator, 10 or 11 at the time, is visited by one of her parents’ friends, and what might have gone horribly wrong doesn’t only because her brother appears at the door. Decades later, her parents divorced, the narrator finds herself inexplicably seeking this man “in beer cellars and dance halls and country-and-western bars.” Two of the stories view a similarly splintered nuclear family from radically different angles. In “Old Growth,” Gwyneth takes a road trip with her ex-husband, Ray, to check out some land he intends to buy, while in “Bear Country,” set a few years earlier but appearing later in the collection, Ray, in the family cabin soon to be sold, spends the summer with his troubled teenage son while a bear lurks nearby. Alward is a master of near disasters: “Bundle of Joy” starts out as a satire about a critical mother going for a visit to meet her infant grandson and complaining about the infant’s short legs and her son-in-law’s beard, which reminds her of “a neglected box hedge.” As grandma Ruth consumes ever more alcohol, the story veers into an account of an accident involving the child and then takes an unexpected turn into sympathy for Ruth. With a coolly dispassionate voice, Alward views the small horrors of domesticity, “the ungodly screech of the Fisher-Price phone as its bulbous eyes rolled back” or the creaking strain on a marriage inflicted by the necessity of removing six layers of wallpaper, and turns them into stories whose implications reverberate far beyond the walls of any home.
Refreshingly tart reflections on family fragmentation and its aftershocks.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781771965620
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
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 pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.
A French art historian’s English-language fiction debut combines the story of a loving relationship between a grandfather and granddaughter with an enlightening discussion of art.
One day, when 10-year-old Mona removes the necklace given to her by her now-dead grandmother, she experiences a frightening, hour-long bout of blindness. Her parents take her to the doctor, who gives her a variety of tests and also advises that she see a psychiatrist. Her grandfather Henry tells her parents that he will take care of that assignment, but instead, he takes Mona on weekly visits to either the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, or the Centre Pompidou, where each week they study a single work of art, gazing at it deeply and then discussing its impact and history and the biography of its maker. For the reader’s benefit, Schlesser also describes each of the works in scrupulous detail. As the year goes on, Mona faces the usual challenges of elementary school life and the experiences of being an only child, and slowly begins to understand the causes of her temporary blindness. Primarily an amble through a few dozen of Schlesser’s favorite works of art—some well known and others less so, from Botticelli and da Vinci through Basquiat and Bourgeois—the novel would probably benefit from being read at a leisurely pace. While the dialogue between Henry and the preternaturally patient and precocious Mona sometimes strains credulity, readers who don’t have easy access to the museums of Paris may enjoy this vicarious trip in the company of a guide who focuses equally on that which can be seen and the context that can’t be. Come for the novel, stay for the introductory art history course.
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9798889661115
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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