A compelling slice-of-life story, told from two points of view in two different time periods.
Guarino’s novel charts the lives and loves of a grandmother and her granddaughter.
Elizabeth turns 90 surrounded by her family in the home she cherishes. No longer able to live alone without a helper, she now cohabitates with her granddaughter, Amanda, who moved in with Elizabeth after breaking up with her ex. Amanda insists that she’s fine being alone, just working and spending time with her grandmother, but Elizabeth doesn’t want her granddaughter to close her heart to the possibilities that life brings. So begins a story split into two separate narrative threads that follow Elizabeth’s early adulthood in the 1950s and Amanda’s life in the present. In many ways, their stories mirror each other, beginning with Elizabeth’s loss of her fiance and Amanda’s breakup. In 1953, Elizabeth is involved in an accident; in the hospital, she is fortunate to meet the handsome Dr. Joseph Paterson. During her hospital stay, the two develop a close bond, and after a chance reunion some months later, Joe asks her to dinner, beginning a love story for the ages. (“Dr. Paterson chuckled. ‘So you’re free then?’ ‘Free as in tonight or free as in unattached?’ ‘Both.’”) In the present day, Amanda attends a work conference where she happens to meet a passionate attorney named Jesse Taylor, and the two hit it off almost immediately. Life still has curveballs in store for both women, but Elizabeth’s strength and passion and Amanda’s drive (along with the courage she gets from her grandmother) should see them both through. In this modestly scaled novel, the romantic subplot is just the icing on the cake—the real story is about both Elizabeth and Amanda finding their happiness. Guarino’s use of alternating perspectives makes the parallels between the women’s lives even more pronounced and keeps the story moving at a quick pace, never lingering on any particular scene. Though the narrative is relatively brief, the author doesn’t skimp on providing depth for her characters, giving them both love interests and emotional backstories that firmly establish Amanda and Elizabeth as their own separate characters, despite their similarities.
A compelling slice-of-life story, told from two points of view in two different time periods.Pub Date: March 27, 2024
ISBN: 9781685133924
Page Count: 287
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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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