A sincere environmental message is underserved by flawed storytelling.
The carving out of a railway branch line brings dramatic shifts to a rural English valley.
Set in the mid-19th century, Aronowitz’s novel vividly evokes the impact of the industrial revolution on a traditional community, as the new rail track is dug and blasted across the Herefordshire countryside. For 17-year-old Grace Matthews, a member of the Anti-Railway League and self-styled “guardian of the woods and fields who had to defend nature from attack,” this development, like “the factories, the coal-black smokestacks, the stagnating canals,” is ruining the natural world. It’s also adding to the fury she already feels towards her father, a doctor (and rail supporter) whom she blames for the death of her mother from breast cancer, and who now treats his daughter as an unpaid cook and maid. For Sean McClennan, one of the Irish navvies—laborers—doing the backbreaking physical work for the rail company, the job generates money to send back to Ireland, to help the faltering family farm. Inevitably, these two figures will experience mutual attraction and meet. Meanwhile, Grace has begun to punish her father, using her knowledge of herbalism to infect his snuff with hallucinogenic dried mushrooms, leading to manic episodes, and eventually to the novel’s second time stream, set some seven years later, which finds Grace incarcerated in Hereford’s Insane Asylum for her crimes against her parent. Although absorbingly detailed, the book’s narrative terrain is a tight and relatively static one which Aronowitz circles repeatedly—the timeless beauty of the natural world, the violent damage to the landscape, Sean’s homesickness and financial need, Grace’s anger. Moreover, Grace is a cool, rebarbative, and somewhat anachronistic figure. She spies on Sean at the navvies’ camp, boldly walks into his digs uninvited one day, and elsewhere calls an innkeeper a “stupid bigot.” The mismatched romance similarly lacks conviction, as does the tale’s abrupt, open-ended cessation.
A sincere environmental message is underserved by flawed storytelling.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781771839785
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Guernica World Editions
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
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
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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