If this is also Ford’s curtain call, he has done himself proud.
Frank Bascombe receives the send-off he deserves in this fifth book of the series, following Let Me Be Frank With You (2014).
Death is very much on the mind of the 74-year-old narrator of this curtain call of a novel. But not primarily his own. His one surviving son, Paul, has contracted ALS (or “Al’s,” as they personify it), and Frank is shepherding him through what both know will be his final days—first at the Mayo Clinic in wintry, frigid Rochester, Minnesota, and then on a pilgrimage to Mount Rushmore. It’s a trip that both men find senseless and absurd, but you have to fill a life somehow, even if it’s about to end. Paul has neither forgotten nor forgiven his parents' split, their marriage doomed after the death of his brother. Now Paul’s mother (Frank’s first ex-wife) is dead as well. Frank seems adrift, but then he always has. He’s a reflective man but not a particularly deep thinker, more reactive to the vagaries of life than purposeful at determining any particular goal, direction, or meaning. But death—his first wife’s, his son’s, and eventually his own—gives him a lot to ponder about the meaning of it all, if there is any, and causes him to reflect on the life he has lived through the previous novels. One needn’t have read those to appreciate this, but it could well inspire readers to revisit the entire fictional cycle, launched to great acclaim with The Sportswriter (1986). As its title alludes, the new novel focuses on Valentine’s Day, as much as Independence Day (1995) did on that holiday: It’s a novel about the ambiguities of love and happiness. Frank remains a funny guy, both ha-ha funny and a little odd, but Ford couldn’t be more serious about his craft, his precision, his attention to detail, his need to say exactly what he means.
If this is also Ford’s curtain call, he has done himself proud.Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: 9780061692086
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
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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