There is only one Patricia Lockwood, and this surreal, silly, and sneakily profound book could only be hers.
In the wake of a disorienting illness, a woman attempts to write “a masterpiece about being confused.”
What on earth is happening to the unnamed protagonist of this novel? She suffers from “bizarre nonsense dreams,” feels there is “a secret number between two and three,” and sees “a zigzag” in the corner of her eye that she refers to as “the angel.” Has an unnamed illness “stolen her old mind and given her a new one?” We’re told she “first got sick” in March 2020, and because the details of the protagonist’s life and work track so closely with the author’s, we assume it is Covid-19, which left Lockwood in a post-Covid fog, described in an essay for the London Review of Books. This is no straightforward illness diary, but a “mad notebook” capturing the sensory experience and psychic state of a character in extremis. It opens with a family trip to Scotland, seemingly before the pandemic—but never mind, linearity and narrative are beside the point. In Scotland, the protagonist suddenly believes in fairies; throughout the book she is obsessed with changelings, doppelgängers, knockoff Cabbage Patch Kids, cloned sheep, Mrs. Doubtfire, a potential TV adaptation of her memoir, Priestdaddy, and all manner of facsimiles that point toward the existential question of the title. Somewhat incidentally, she reads and feverishly analyzes Anna Karenina, tries her hand at metalworking, and, after her husband undergoes emergency surgery that leaves him with 36 staples in the abdomen, finds herself “in charge of the Wound.” Wherever this phantasmagoric book takes us, it is shot through with a poet’s love for the slippery absurdities of language and abundant laugh-out-loud gags. Can we hope for a one-woman show?
There is only one Patricia Lockwood, and this surreal, silly, and sneakily profound book could only be hers.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593718551
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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