This enjoyable Yuletide tale deserves a place under many a Christmas tree.
The latest addition to the author’s Noel Collection is chock-full of holiday spirit.
Noel Book is a New York City book editor who’s named after her birthday. She flies to Salt Lake City to visit her estranged father, Robert Book, before he dies of cancer and stay with him until his passing. Sadly, he dies hours before her arrival. “He tried to hold on for you,” her father’s friend says. “His last words were ‘Tell Noel I’m sorry.’ ” She desperately wants to return to New York, but then she's fired from her job while still in Utah. Meanwhile, she inherits Dad’s beloved bookstore and $1 million of life insurance along with his house and everything in it, “including all his personal belongings, which includes his automobile, his Lladró and rare book collection.” Now “he’d created roots to keep me here. Roots or chains?” She is an angry woman who thinks God (if such there be) hates her. She’d rejected her father’s love after her mother's death in a car accident years earlier, and in “the last two months I’d lost my marriage, my apartment, my father, and now my job.” Next, she breaks off a budding romantic relationship and alienates Dad’s devoted friends. “You spread pain everywhere you go,” she’s told. In a word, she’s being a jerk. Luckily, Dad’s love was unconditional. He’d had a thriving business, a life surrounded by the books he loved, and friends who loved him deeply. In his final days, he wants his daughter to be happy. Throughout the story, she receives a series of wisdom-filled anonymous letters, handwritten in feminine script and signed “Tabula Rasa.” Who could be sending them? The reader will guess, but Noel guesses wrong. There’s a Dickensian arc that will make readers break out the eggnog and Christmas cookies. It evokes Tiny Tim’s exhortation: “God bless us, every one.”
This enjoyable Yuletide tale deserves a place under many a Christmas tree.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2960-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 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
SEEN & HEARD
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.
A French art historian’s English-language fiction debut combines the story of a loving relationship between a grandfather and granddaughter with an enlightening discussion of art.
One day, when 10-year-old Mona removes the necklace given to her by her now-dead grandmother, she experiences a frightening, hour-long bout of blindness. Her parents take her to the doctor, who gives her a variety of tests and also advises that she see a psychiatrist. Her grandfather Henry tells her parents that he will take care of that assignment, but instead, he takes Mona on weekly visits to either the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, or the Centre Pompidou, where each week they study a single work of art, gazing at it deeply and then discussing its impact and history and the biography of its maker. For the reader’s benefit, Schlesser also describes each of the works in scrupulous detail. As the year goes on, Mona faces the usual challenges of elementary school life and the experiences of being an only child, and slowly begins to understand the causes of her temporary blindness. Primarily an amble through a few dozen of Schlesser’s favorite works of art—some well known and others less so, from Botticelli and da Vinci through Basquiat and Bourgeois—the novel would probably benefit from being read at a leisurely pace. While the dialogue between Henry and the preternaturally patient and precocious Mona sometimes strains credulity, readers who don’t have easy access to the museums of Paris may enjoy this vicarious trip in the company of a guide who focuses equally on that which can be seen and the context that can’t be. Come for the novel, stay for the introductory art history course.
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9798889661115
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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