A beautifully written exploration of identity, memory, power, and agency.
A missing woman’s past upends the lives of the women around her.
In Wasserman’s new novel, the author of Girls on Fire (2016) explores the lives of three women after one of them goes missing. Despite everyone telling her to move on, college student Alice is searching for her mother, who's disappeared. When she discovers her mother has gone missing before, she sets out to find her and the truth—which brings her to the door of Elizabeth Strauss. While working as a fellow at the Meadowlark Institute for Memory Research, Strauss, who at that time was going by the nickname Lizzie, was invited to join a once-in-a-lifetime project by “psychology’s latest golden god,” Dr. Benjamin Strauss (then her boss, now her recently deceased husband). The project? Studying Alice’s mother, aka Wendy Doe, a woman found on a bus without identification or memories, who's in a dissociative fugue state. Wendy’s perspective is also offered through lyrical diary entries in which she explores who she is, who she’s not, and what’s happening to her in the moment (which is all she has). Told in alternating perspectives by Alice, Elizabeth, and Lizzie, the novel is like a knot being slowly unraveled. While a bit disorienting at first, Wasserman’s choice to differentiate between Lizzie’s point of view (the past) and Elizabeth’s (the present) succeeds narratively and thematically. By offering one woman’s insights at different points in time, the novel explores the ways time, memory, and hindsight inform who we are and who we become. After completing an exercise where she lists every memory she’s had in the last two weeks, Lizzie realizes: “Almost everything that happens is forgotten. Decades swallowed. Maybe...the mystery isn’t why we forget some things and not others. Maybe the mystery is why we ever remember.” In addition to meditating on personhood and recollection, Wasserman deftly explores power dynamics, ambition, and the lingering scars of trauma.
A beautifully written exploration of identity, memory, power, and agency.Pub Date: July 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3949-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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
SEEN & HEARD
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