A well-crafted and enchanting historical love story.
After losing her first great love to illness, a 17th-century Englishwoman falls for a forbidden man.
Cecilia couldn’t believe her good luck when she married William Thorowgood, the boy she’d always loved. Unfortunately, soon after the wedding, William falls victim to the plague and succumbs to a quick death. Following this loss, Cecilia spirals into a deep depression. Her sister, Margaret, takes her in, hoping to nurse her back to health. When days turn to weeks with no improvement, Margaret’s power-hungry husband, Robert Eden, declares Cecilia must take a new husband or remove herself from their home by the end of summer. Desperate to save Cecilia from an uncertain future, Margaret seeks help from David Mendes, a Jewish doctor from Portugal with a reputation for fixing incurable ailments, including melancholy. Cecilia is initially taken aback by David’s unfamiliar customs, but she soon begins to appreciate his quiet manner and thoughtful care. Before long, the pair develop a genuine friendship, and David’s visits help Cecilia improve—so much so that she begins sneaking out of Margaret’s home to explore London. These outings lead to a chance meeting with David, which ignites a new relationship between them. It’s clear they’re developing deeper feelings for each other, but given their vastly different backgrounds, their love is an impossibility. With rich prose and a plethora of delightful period details, shifting between Cecilia’s and David’s first-person perspectives, the story deftly explores their feelings of unlikely connection, as well as the isolation and hopelessness that can accompany loss of a loved one. Despite the sorrow burdening both main characters, the plot moves forward at an engaging clip, and the author manages to include sprinkles of levity at just the right pace to prevent the book from feeling oppressively bleak. While the writing often feels too modern, with characters acting in a manner too familiar or uttering surprisingly modern phrases, the story is sufficiently engaging to render the anachronisms forgivable.
A well-crafted and enchanting historical love story.Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9780593597873
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dell
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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
SEEN & HEARD
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