A taut, poignant snapshot of migration.
Venezuela’s economic collapse fragments a family seeking safety beyond its borders.
Morán’s second novel (and first in English translation) is set in 2018, as the death of President Hugo Chávez and the rise of Nicolás Maduro has sent the nation’s economy into a tailspin: “Inflation was at 130,060 percent. A basic trip to the grocery store cost 220 times the minimum wage,” she writes. That prompts a young woman, Nina Gutiérrez, to leave her mother, Graciela, and daughter, Elisa, back in their home city of Maracaibo and head for Porto Alegre, Brazil, seeking a better life. The trip is an ordeal: Contempt for immigrants runs deep (arsonists set her migrant camp ablaze) and work is scarce, prompting her to squat in a university storage room and scare up housecleaning work. Meanwhile, Nina’s estranged ex-husband, Camilo, has arrived to take Elisa to Houston, where his well-off parents live, and start fresh in America. (Both Nina and Camilo were committed socialists during the Chavez years, but Camilo’s wealth and Nina’s relative poverty became a point of tension.) Nina’s and Elisa’s fates are central to the story’s conflict, as their distance extends across two continents, but the narrative cycles through the perspectives of multiple characters, including Nina’s father, Raúl, recently deceased and speaking from a kind of purgatory that echoes the country’s own precarious position. Though writing out of Venezuela is rare for American audiences, Morán’s perspective on migration will resonate with readers familiar with themes of separation, asylum, bigotry, and resettling. What distinguishes the novel is Morán’s ability to write in a variety of tones (ably captured by translator Jones) and her evocation of the desperation that fills migrants from different generations and class levels in different ways, and how skills and money are of little use, even when they’re trying “to start over in a city where Venezuelans weren’t yet regarded as a pest.”
A taut, poignant snapshot of migration.Pub Date: July 28, 2026
ISBN: 9780593803936
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
