A lengthy but richly told historical tale.
A family saga that begins in rural Italy in the mid-1800s and follows the Wallabee clan over 70 years as they pursue success in America.
In 1847, married Italians Angelina and Guido Wallabia sail to the United States and settle in Fall River, Massachusetts, where Guido gets a textile-factory job. (Their name was changed due to a misspelling on an official document.) They later have three sons, and the Wallabees’ lives intersect with those of Miranda LaFleur and her brother, Francois, who flee their servant jobs in Canada. The siblings settle in Fall River and change their surname to Davis, and Francois manages to get a menial job in the town, which has become the country’s largest textile manufacturing center. However, the Troy Mill, the most successful company, offers nothing but backbreaking, low-paying work. Samuel, the eldest Wallabee boy, goes from being a dirt-poor mill worker to a graduate of Harvard University on a scholarship. His professor/mentor gives him a management position at the Troy Mill when he graduates in 1872. Samuel’s arranged marriage to Miranda Davis falters after the birth of their son, Calvin; Samuel blames his wife’s indifference toward him on the baby, so father and son are estranged for 22 years. Eventually, however, Calvin joins his dad at the Troy Mill. Then orphan Annie Kenny takes a central role in the story, which leads to the exposure of a dark, long-held secret. This is a meticulously researched work that presents a sprawling story in a place and time period that will be unfamiliar to many fans of historical fiction. Although it’s nearly 400 pages in length, Rohda’s debut still manages to glide along thanks to the author’s exquisite use of language, as in references to “the leached gray gloom and suffocating predictability of Angelina’s life” or a pair of characters’ “airy, meringue dreams.” At another point, the narration engagingly notes, “Sometimes something happens—you meet someone, you learn something—and your life can never be the same again because the truth does not always set you free.”
A lengthy but richly told historical tale.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63152-719-7
Page Count: 408
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: June 29, 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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