A compelling premise dimmed by flawed exposition.
Two American women of different generations try to make sense of their lives in 1980s Paris.
It’s 1982, and Lily Owens, raised in London by American parents, has graduated from university. Her sister, Maude, suggests she brush up on her French, live in Paris for a year, and take a course on French civilization. In France, Lily meets Octave de Malbert, a Frenchman looking for an au pair for his aging aunt, Amenia Quinon, who has a degenerative eye disease and lives in an enormous house Octave hopes to inherit. Amenia has lived in Paris for 65 years, having married a rich Frenchman, François, whom she met on her family’s ranch in Wyoming. Amenia is initially cold to Lily. At her program, the recent college grad befriends two Americans, who introduce Lily to Thibaud, a French law student hoping to leave France for the United States. Amenia’s large, mostly empty house sits in what had been Jewish ghetto prior to World War II, and Lily essentially allows Thibaud to squat there. The narrative switches between Amenia’s and Lily’s perspectives, and though their relationship is tense, they’re mirrors and inversions of each other. Amenia escaped her old life yet becomes more and more obsessed with her past, while Lily, looking to form relationships in France, worries about her future. Unfortunately, this dynamic goes largely unexplored in favor of other struggles, Amenia with the grief and guilt she feels over François and her political inaction during the Holocaust, and Lily with Thibaud as he invites more squatters into the house. There are some compelling passages, largely concerning Paris’ Jewish history. Fleming’s prose, however, tends toward dull exposition: “I’ve always believed my mother would have been a happier individual if she hadn’t married my father. Because she wasn’t in love with him but with his parents, or at least what his parents appeared to be....Their lack of common interest was a recipe for dissatisfaction, unhappiness.” Still, the setup is intriguing, and readers will want to know the intertwined fates of the two leads, the interloper, and the French mansion.
A compelling premise dimmed by flawed exposition.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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
© 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.
