Though its metaphors are familiar, Lucas’ portrayal of love and desire exerts a wonderful pull.
Australian writer Lucas’ debut charts the tides of love, memory, and longing as it explores not why love ends but how it ebbs and flows.
The novel opens with the narrator’s discovery, found through online sleuthing, that a former lover is now a father. She casts back to when she was 24, on vacation with her mother at Sailors Beach. Swimming alone, she encounters Jude, a former actor almost 20 years her senior who lives nearby and restores furniture. Their attraction is immediate, like an undertow. The narrator, an aspiring writer, whom Jude calls “Sharkbait,” then “love,” quickly trades her dreams of travel for the desire that Jude awakens in her, making “everything suddenly unbearably erotic, alive.” Their intimacy is compelling in its urgency while also leaving room for silence as they navigate the tension between Jude’s perspective that love is “a gift” and the narrator’s understanding of it as a “need.” When they find a dog on the beach, it becomes a stand-in for their bond, as a child would; and though the narrator dreams of a baby, she finds herself counseling Maeve, a potential rival, about a pregnancy. Throughout, the narrator reflects on her relationship with her mother; at times, these passages eclipse the love story: “As a child, I’d imagined her as something diffuse, like vapor or air. Necessary, and all around me, but somehow elusive, ungraspable.” Water imagery is everywhere, threatening to make the novel’s metaphors predictable: Orgasms are waves, as is grief, and the ocean and the shore are lovers. While Lucas’ meditation on relationships is masterful, the ending falls flat—in a book where love leaves an indelible mark, it’s hard to believe that the final conflict sets its characters adrift.
Though its metaphors are familiar, Lucas’ portrayal of love and desire exerts a wonderful pull.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781953534651
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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
SEEN & HEARD
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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