An entertaining and ultimately tender book.
A summer vacation to the beaches of South Carolina reunites childhood friends Lisa and Poppy and their families, but when the week ends in tragedy, the survivors are left to untangle the secrets snarled just beneath the surface of their seemingly ordinary lives.
Lisa and Scott Daly are rich and unhappy. Married almost 20 years, they've settled into a routine of petty irritations that contains neither passion nor interest in each other’s lives. When they win an all-expenses-paid vacation to Fripp Island, South Carolina, at Scott’s company’s Christmas party, Lisa jumps at the chance to invite her best friend, Poppy, who has stayed in their hometown of Wheeling, West Virginia, and lives the kind of working-class life Lisa escaped with her marriage to Scott. From the first it's apparent that the families have brought their problems with them to the island. Lisa feels certain Scott is having an affair, one that he seems to be pursuing even on his family vacation. Poppy’s husband, John, is recovering from a nagging back injury, but his reliance on pain medicine has Poppy up every night counting his pills. Poppy’s oldest child, Ryan, an awkward but handsome boy primed to leave for college in the fall, spends more and more time immersed in mysterious projects, and Lisa’s 14-year-old daughter, Rae, is a seething mass of hormones and fragile teenage ego. The younger girls, Poppy’s Alex and Lisa’s Kimmy, are at crossroads of their own, poised in the fraught territory between childhood and the first of their teenage years. Throw into the mix a handyman on the sex-offender registry and his long-distance-runner wife—the improbably named Keats and Roxie Firestone—and the mood of the week is a mix of emotional turmoil with the occasional golden moment of beachfront reconciliation. However, the opening chapter is narrated by the ghost of one member of these two families, describing the moment of their murder during that vacation from the vantage of 20 years in the future. With that in mind, the reader is primed to pick up all the tantalizing clues Kauffman weaves through her sometimes exposition-heavy prose. Our assumptions about whose tensions, desires, rages, and shy longings might erupt into murder are provoked and reversed right up until the final pages, when the mystery of Fripp Island is revealed.
An entertaining and ultimately tender book.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-358-04152-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
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
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
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