A mostly satisfying variation on a familiar motif.
A new spin on the theme of entwined mothers and daughters.
Debut novelist Otis follows the unstable Charlotte and her driven daughter, Viva, an aspiring dancer, from an eventful stint on Cape Cod in 1979 when Viva is 11 through the next couple of decades, with flashbacks to Charlotte's fraught encounters with the man who will become, though he doesn't know it, Viva's father. Charlotte and Viva are, like many a fictional mother-daughter pair, “a society of two.” After the summer in Cape Cod, they move to California, where they stay with Charlotte's sister. Charlotte picks up a series of odd jobs, and Viva attends a performing arts high school and then college before moving to New York to start a career. When an accident brings that career to a halt, Viva returns to California and starts falling into the same self-destructive patterns that have stymied her mother even as her mother begins to experience ever more serious symptoms of mental and physical illness. While Viva is more sympathetic as a girl and a teenager than as an alcoholic 20-something with bad taste in men and no idea what to do with her life, and the subplot involving her father seems tacked on, Otis pays rapt attention not just to the two complicated women, but to the other characters with whom they interact, from the hippie couple with whom Charlotte shares a mutual dislike at their campground on Cape Cod to the longtime frenemy with whom Viva competes and the mean-spirited high school students she teaches in California. She steers ably away from cliché in what could easily have been a conventionally tense relationship between mother and daughter, documenting the ways in which both are distorted by the “umbilical cord” that stretches between them for decades but allowing them to be individuals with their own quirks and longings as well.
A mostly satisfying variation on a familiar motif.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9798985282825
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Zibby Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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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