A thoroughly enjoyable and inviting story with well-drawn characters.
Kahn’s heartfelt saga follows a group of young lawyers through 25 years of their lives together.
It’s 1981 and Gabe Pollack, Susan Baker, Eric Cameron, and Norman Greenberg meet at orientation for the Chicago white-shoe law firm where they’ve all recently been hired. They are, of course, the best of the best. Norman’s wife, Esther, insists that the foursome have a potluck (“That way we can meet each other’s spouses, get to know one another, maybe even become—you know, maybe—friends,” Norman says), and this regular event, over the years, becomes the loose framework of the novel. Readers glide through the story of their career changes, their kids, and the inevitable challenges that life brings. If there is one lodestar, it’s the unbreakable friendship that the four attorneys and their spouses share. Significantly, at book’s end, none of the main players work for that white-shoe law firm anymore. Readers learn in an afterword that Kahn’s real-life experience as a young lawyer formed the template for this fictional story. The author, who’s still a practicing attorney, has written multiple mystery novels—so when, halfway through the book, none of the characters have met with foul play, the reader begins to stop expecting mayhem and slides into the comforting narrative, as into a hot bath. The book is immensely readable, and sometimes Kahn even gives the game away by intruding as the storyteller—a nice touch that reaffirms the book’s charm. Does the author push too hard to provide a happy ending? To think that is to wish, churlishly, for just a few more deaths, diseases, or divorces. Sometimes, one needs a book like this one—a pleasant love letter to a profession, and to professional friends.
A thoroughly enjoyable and inviting story with well-drawn characters.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9798891326750
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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