A heart-wrenching story of love, family, racism, and resistance across decades.
The daughter of a well-to-do Black family is drawn into the Civil Rights Movement. Three decades later, her daughter pushes limits and uncovers family secrets.
Johnson’s powerful second novel begins with Freda Gilroy’s first day at Nashville’s Fisk University in 1959. She has instructions from her parents to be excellent and above reproach. They’ve already identified a medical student, Gerald Vance, to be her future husband. The Chicago girl is stunned by the racism she experiences in the South, segregation nothing like what she’s seen back home. Her parents have forbidden her to get involved in protests, but she’s drawn in by Darius Moore, a handsome saxophone player and Civil Rights activist who gives soul-stirring speeches. She’s thrown into a dilemma—her college years are spent resisting her feelings for Darius, hiding her activism, and then weighing which man, and which kind of life, she wants to choose. Three decades later, Freda’s daughter, Tulip, a public relations professional, has defied her parents by dating a working-class man. Key, her boyfriend of two years, is a bus driver. She is uncomfortable as one of few Black employees at her PR agency and is striving for a promotion. She’s stunned when the police officers who attacked Rodney King are acquitted and feels driven to speak up. In doing so, she learns more about her work, her parents, her lover, and herself. Each of the main characters are sympathetic, even as they make choices that lead to pain for others. Johnson doesn’t flinch from the terror young activists experienced in the Civil Rights era, and by exploring the parallels in Tulip’s life 30 years later, Johnson emphasizes that while some things change, racism stays the same.
A heart-wrenching story of love, family, racism, and resistance across decades.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780063157514
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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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