An engaging, unsettling, and emotional story that meaningfully engages with fraught social issues.
In Blair’s historical novel, based on true events, three white college friends navigate the pressures of unwanted pregnancies and racism in the early 1960s.
Thea Miller and Chris Christenson meet at the University of Michigan in September of 1961. Their friendship is immediate and intense. In February of 1962, Cilla Wood, who has injured her back rehearsing for a Broadway show in New York, arrives as an older first-semester freshman and meets Thea and Chris; the duo becomes a trio. On summer break, Cilla takes a job in Seattle, where she meets her true love: Joseph Bomani, a Black man from Tanganyika who is studying at the Kansas University. Meanwhile, inspired by her friend Frank, Thea joins him doing volunteer work in San Francisco, and Chris heads off to do volunteer work in Jamaica, where she falls in love with a local Black leader named Winston. Over the next school year, Cilla faces a pregnancy scare, Chris finds herself pregnant and decides on an illegal abortion, and Thea becomes pregnant and chooses to have the baby and put her up for adoption. Blair’s narrative is an exploration of the emotional, psychological, societal, and familial complexities and challenges regarding abortion, adoption, and interracial dating, the aftereffects of which linger throughout her characters’ adult years. The author captures the angst and ethos of campus life in the early, pre–Roe v. Wade 1960s and bakes in a primer on the period’s history, referencing the Cuban Missile Crisis, the blatant racism, the misogyny of the medical profession, and the burgeoning Civil Rights movement (“A meeting of Students for a Democratic Society. She wondered what kind of group it was. For Democrats? If she’d been old enough to vote in the 1960 election, she’d have voted for Kennedy. Maybe she’d look into it”). This homage to loving friendships also touches on the issues of mental illness and bisexuality. Blair’s prose is conversational and accessible, vividly evoking a time when social values were on the cusp of great change.
An engaging, unsettling, and emotional story that meaningfully engages with fraught social issues.Pub Date: June 16, 2025
ISBN: 9798992086102
Page Count: 412
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
