A sprightly debut.
The fortunes and misfortunes of a Colombian American family in South Florida.
Just as she’s about to start her senior year of high school, Luciana finds her life going off track: Hurricane Irma is about to make landfall and her mother insists that they evacuate. Although they plead with her grandmother to go with them, the strong-willed Emilia absolutely refuses. In Mogollon’s bouncy debut novel, angry, exasperated, melodramatic Luciana is the voluble narrator, recounting the events of her life in phone calls to her older sister, Mari, a student at George Washington University. Luciana sorely misses Mari, envying her freedom, jealous because their mother obviously favors Mari, but needing her love. She shares with Mari predictable teenage angst about her dismal grades, the stress of applying to college, and her mother’s obsession with her weight. She resents, too, her mother’s homophobia. “When I told her that I liked girls,” Luciana says, “…she didn’t go to work for like two weeks.” But after she and her mother return to Florida, Luciana’s calls to Mari become focused less on her own problems and more on a family crisis: Her beloved grandmother—a foxy woman who has had two boob jobs and won’t leave the house without full makeup—is seriously ill. Suddenly, Luciana becomes her mother’s confidante; she gets close to her grandmother’s sister, long estranged, who has come to help out and, she hopes, to be forgiven; and she is privy to dark secrets from her grandmother herself. In call after shocking call, Luciana imparts to Mari a tangled history of their Colombian American family, which began with the murder of a great-grandfather and involves incest, sexual assault, abandonment, blackmail, and betrayal. “This is all basically a Telemundo soap opera,” Luciana tells Mari. Mogollon’s fresh, ebullient narrator is at once irreverent and caring, anxious about the future but eager to embrace adulthood, fearful of loss and filled with love.
A sprightly debut.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9780593594902
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
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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