The glamorous art world, juicy family discord, an Italian villa, potential murder—it’s hard to ask more from a summer read.
Siblings journey to an Italian lakeside villa to investigate the drowning death of their father.
Famed artist Vic Kemp invites his four children to a bombshell of a London lunch. A playboy for decades, the 76-year-old is in love. Twenty-seven-year-old Bella-Mae has had a startling effect on Vic: He has forsworn alcohol, preferring her “special” tea; lost weight; and is planning his final masterpiece. The siblings, between 30 and 40, are alarmed. Netta assumes her father is prey to a gold digger; Susan is worried her caretaking will be usurped; Goose, also Vic’s studio assistant, is hurt he’s been left out of this latest work; and baby Iris only wants what’s best—whatever that is. The four are unbreakably close, having raised each other after their young mother’s death and their father’s haphazard parenting, and yet are devoted to him and his domineering allure. This compelling family tableau turns thrilling when Vic—thinner, secretive—texts that he and Bella-Mae have married at his Italian villa. A few weeks later he is found dead in the lake. As the siblings converge at their summer home, the novel begins to skirt the edges of a whodunit, but as they attempt to solve the mystery, their relationships with each other begin to fray. Each of them has been damaged by Vic, and at an explosive lakeside dinner, long-simmering resentments are revealed. This dramatic conclusion, hinted at in the prologue, is not the end—instead the novel marches ahead 10 years for a summation that is, although pleasing, a bit strained in its insistence that everybody gets a slice of happiness.
The glamorous art world, juicy family discord, an Italian villa, potential murder—it’s hard to ask more from a summer read.Pub Date: June 24, 2025
ISBN: 9780593448298
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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