A multigenerational exploration of slavery’s legacy and the power of Black joy and Black love.
New fiction from the bestselling author of Caul Baby (2021).
In 2019, Ardelia Gibbs and Oliver Benjamin are celebrating their engagement on the roof of a restaurant in midtown Manhattan. White linen tablecloths. Floral arches. Sliders and macarons. Nineties soul on the sound system. As the celebration is winding down, Oliver taps his glass to get everyone’s attention. He has a gift for his bride-to-be: a letter that has been passed down from generation to generation in his family, a letter written by a woman named Tirzah to a man named Harrison in 1865. After this prologue, the narrative moves back in time to Mississippi in the aftermath of the Civil War, back to the time in which Tirzah sent a letter to her beloved Harrison with no guarantee that he would ever receive it. The couple had been separated and, while the Freedmen’s Bureau gave them a way to find each other again, there was little chance of them reconnecting. In the mythic version of the American story, emancipation is a single glorious moment when enslaved people become free. Jerkins makes it very clear that the truth is not nearly so simple as she explores a growing family tree and more than 100 years of history. The journey Jerkins’ characters take is similar to the story she shares about her own ancestors in her memoir, Wandering in Strange Lands (2020). In this work of fiction, as in her nonfiction, the author underscores the fact that establishing freedom and protecting freedom is very different from being granted freedom. And by beginning her narrative at a contemporary engagement party, Jerkins foregrounds the unifying power of family and community in creating a Black culture that doesn’t just survive, but thrives.
A multigenerational exploration of slavery’s legacy and the power of Black joy and Black love.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9780063234086
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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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