A complicated yet well-managed novel that will captivate readers fascinated by this era.
Political machinations impact the lives of two very different families in this historical novel by Coffey.
Zoya Zarubina and Irina Anokhin first meet when they are 5 years old in Harbin, China. Both girls live in the same building—Zoya, the daughter of a diplomat, lives on the top floor, and Irina, whose father is a doorman, lives in the basement. Zoya describes how she grew up around Soviet NKVD (secret police officers), as her father’s job was to usher Russians back home who had fled to China during the Russian Civil War of 1917-1920. Irina’s father, Boris, cannot return to Russia, as he was a White Army colonel who executed Red Army prisoners. Zoya’s father leaves, and her new stepfather, Leonid Eitingon, is later revealed to be the Soviet intelligence officer tasked with Leon Trotsky’s assassination. Meanwhile, Boris is arrested and forced by the secret service to work in Istanbul as a doorman and a spy. The Anokhin family is divided, and Irina and her mother are sent to a gulag. Zoya goes on to become a translator, working on American atomic bomb secrets for Russia, and, in later life, she begins interviewing the aging Leonid to understand the horror the regime brought to families such as the Anokhins. Coffey demonstrates an enviable understanding of Russian history, skillfully intertwining the lives of real-life and fictional characters. Lengthy passages in which Leonid recalls his role in Trotsky’s assassination dominate the novel, punctuated with chillingly evocative description: “We shot most of them at once – a bloody night; the executioners’ hands must have ached from pulling triggers.” The author perhaps shows a slight bias toward Zoya and Leonid, leaving the character development of the Anokhin family on the back burner. Still, this is an engrossingly complex novel that breathes life into 20th-century Russian history and provocatively fills in unknown details by melding fiction and fact.
A complicated yet well-managed novel that will captivate readers fascinated by this era.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9798986606965
Page Count: 269
Publisher: Beck and Branch
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
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
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