Perfect for those who like a soupçon of Wittgenstein and a dollop of Meister Eckhart with their sadomasochism.
A young American woman spends 15 years in the obsessive, erotic thrall of an Italian nobleman who lives by the rigid “principles” described by the title of Dektar’s second novel.
Nora first meets the handsome, mysteriously charismatic Nicola in a ski gondola while she’s staying with relatives in Turin. She’s a troubled 15-year-old who self-cuts and obsesses about “different kinds of power,” and he’s slightly older. Nora’s cousin Federica, with whom Nora shares an erotically charged connection, describes Nicola vaguely as “evil,” but when he touches Nora’s shoulder to calm her fear of heights, she experiences a thrilling shock. Five years later, she runs into Nicola at a party at her American college. After they speak briefly, she becomes convinced that, for her, Nicola will always be “the pinnacle of something.” Just what that “something” is becomes the novel’s central unanswered question. Years pass. At 28, Nora believes she’s content living with a “good” man in Brooklyn and working as a researcher for a financial intelligence company. Nora claims she no longer “dwell[s] on control and power.” Wrong! Nicola shows up yet again, and the rest of the novel charts Nora’s slide into their long, increasingly sadomasochistic affair. Recently married and working for his extremely rich, corrupt, perhaps even murderous father, Nicola initially stokes Nora’s desire through talk without touch. His religious mysticism, philosophic pronouncements concerning good and bad, and brutal views on (his own) superiority strike Nora as “romantic,” full of “grand passion, honor, irrational, primitive devotion.” Soon the two are sharing not only interminable conversations, but graphic sex, by turns violent and demeaning as Nicola’s demands intensify. His willing partner, Nora craves his control. She wants to be hit and strangled even while recognizing “something wrong” with Nicola’s entwining of vengeance and intimacy. The book lives inside Nora’s perceptions, which after a while become as redundant as the sex itself.
Perfect for those who like a soupçon of Wittgenstein and a dollop of Meister Eckhart with their sadomasochism.Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9780063282704
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
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
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
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