This novella’s translation from German to English was worth the 75-year wait.
From one winter to the next, a year elapses in the life of a little Austrian girl living on her grandparents’ farm in this novella first published in 1951.
Marili is in her 5th year. Imaginative and with outsize emotions, she’s learning to understand the world around her. She knows her hardworking grandfather, who tells her stories and allows her to help with apple cider-making. She knows the hardworking farmhand, who dotes on her. She knows her beloved grandmother and is just starting to comprehend the reasons behind the old woman’s melancholy—namely, the loss of her children, several of whom died during the war. Included among these deaths is Marili’s mother, Lisl; Marili sometimes makes newspaper dolls to represent her lost family and relegates them to the attic of her little log dollhouse, where she imagines her grandmother happy again because her dead children are once again within reach. The little girl prays at night: “‘Dear God,’ she thought, ‘let no one be sad and take the regret away, definitely do that, please.’” Haushofer’s novella is effortlessly poignant in this way throughout. As the year goes by, Marili experiences the quotidian—the return of her favorite flowers in spring—and the existential, as when she contemplates who Jesus was or when she attacks a bigger boy in town who threatens to drown his own kittens. The reader’s empathy for Marili is almost painful, as she experiences things like bad dreams or seeing a mouse dead in a trap. The book’s charge comes not from plot, but from the emotional tension of finding Marili on the brink of understanding the adult world’s woes and, especially, the mortality that lurks around every corner. Haushofer’s prose is like clear lake water: clean, crisp, seemingly simple yet with surprising depths.
This novella’s translation from German to English was worth the 75-year wait.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9780811239981
Page Count: 80
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 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
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