A thoughtful and affecting novel about generational trauma.
In the fifth of Zimler's novels about the Zarco family, mystical connections impart life-affirming meaning to Polish émigrés who lost most of their family in the Holocaust.
Told through multiple voices in various eras, the novel focuses on Benni and Shelly Zarco, two cousins separated by tragic circumstances. Shelly, who is 11 years older, makes it out of Nazi-controlled Warsaw first, escaping through the forest on his eventual flight to Montreal. A larger-than-life character who opens a downtown sporting goods shop there, he attempts to cope with trauma through his uncontrollable sexual urges for both women and men—including his close cousin. Smuggled out of Warsaw and raised in hiding in the town of Brzeziny by a gentile music teacher to whom he becomes devoted, young Benni is tracked down years later in Poland by Shelly. In New York, he becomes a successful tailor, loving father, and anti-war protester who struggles to see the difference between the Holocaust and the bombing of innocents in Vietnam. Forever haunted by the ultimate sacrifice his great-grandmother made in taking his place on a transport delivering Jews to a Treblinka-bound train, he turns to the cabala for answers. Tracing his Sephardic roots back to Portugal, he hears the thoughts of living and departed people in his head. So do other members of his extended family through their involvement in the arts and medicine. Dialogue is not Zimler's strong suit, and the long coda tracing the history of Jewish persecution back to Egypt is an unnecessary add-on. But the latest effort by the author of The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon (1998) succeeds with its strong emotion, memorable characters, and mosaiclike structure. Zimler's handling of the continuum of time is both moving and unsettling.
A thoughtful and affecting novel about generational trauma.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-913640-64-4
Page Count: 500
Publisher: Parthian Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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
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