A finely wrought story, beautifully told, with deeply memorable characters.
After accidentally causing the death of a fellow driver, a Maine woman does time in prison and then reestablishes her life on the outside.
Violet Powell was just 19, drunk and high, when she caused the death of Lorraine Daigle, a beloved mother and kindergarten teacher. She is convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 28 months in prison. Though she thinks she won’t be able to survive, she does. Prison turns out to be excruciating and monotonous, and while she’s serving time, Troy, her “boyfriend-slash-fiancé-slash-future-slash-everything,” never writes or visits. Even worse, her mother dies and her family blames her. The book club that meets every Friday is her solace, along with Kitten, Jennie Big, Aimee, Dawna-Lynne, and the seven other members of the group. The discussions, in which Violet and her fellow inmates get to exert some control over their lives by complaining about books, are a brief respite. Harriet, the former teacher who leads the group, and the other women are willing to see Violet’s humanity. Violet, who will never forgive herself for her bad choices, is both the best of herself and the worst of herself at every moment. When she’s released, her sister drops her in Portland with a prepaid one-year lease on a furnished apartment, money, clothes, and the information that no one in her town or family can forgive her or wants to see her again. She must find her own way. A chance meeting with Harriet in a bookstore turns into an unexpected meeting with Frank Daigle, husband of the woman whose death she caused. This gorgeously told story follows the first few months after Violet’s release, what she calls the shimmering time, as she tries to define herself on the outside. And at first, only Harriet and Frank are willing to see her for who she is.
A finely wrought story, beautifully told, with deeply memorable characters.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9780063243675
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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