An old-fashioned-feeling issues novel focused on Black and queer lives, with a page-turner of a plot.
In the middle of the 20th century, a queer Black woman who can pass for white and lives as straight discovers the price of her shadow life.
A historical novel bursting with characters and decades of events begins with 18-year-old artist Odette Honore, who’s in love with a girl—something that’s unacceptable in her tightknit Creole community in 1944 New Orleans. But then her girlfriend, Hattie, asks Odette to do the unthinkable: Marry her brother before he goes off to war. Odette agrees, beginning her long tenure of living a lie. The novel’s leitmotif is passing; Odette is often treated as white and lives as straight, which inflicts catastrophic personal damage. Soon Odette is a pregnant widow and she, her sisters, and her sisters’ husbands move to Los Angeles to evade Jim Crow. The move is a success—they find neat houses in a middle-class Black neighborhood and management positions at Columbia Records. Then one day Odette finds her cousin Delphine Kelley raving in the street. Delphine, who left New Orleans to marry a white man and is passing in Los Angeles, is committed to an institution with schizophrenia, set off by “a denial of identity.” Although Odette is falling for co-worker Ginny, she must adopt Delphine’s daughter, and to do that, she must marry again. She chooses the closeted Felix, and their lavender marriage, raising her son and adopted daughter in a hillside bungalow, offers surprising comfort. The novel is rich with cultural references, including conversations about Patricia Highsmith and James Baldwin, the death of Emmett Till, and the Watts riots, offering a counterpoint to Odette’s own journey through experimentation, grief, and revolt. The unfortunate deus ex machina of a wealthy white friend who single-handedly advances Odette’s artistic career is offset by the novel’s sensitive examination of one woman’s hard-fought journey to self-acceptance.
An old-fashioned-feeling issues novel focused on Black and queer lives, with a page-turner of a plot.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9781250810472
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
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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