A clever, timely tale about desperate people maneuvering through a tricky situation.
A Philadelphia couple whose marriage is on the rocks try to fend off their landlords, who are scheming to move back into their house, in this novel.
James Cowper is British, but he has spent his adult life in Philadelphia, married for 20 years to a nurse named Imani. They have one son who is away at college. After some financial setbacks and marriage counseling, they have moved into a historic house. James is working for a firm that secures art for auctions, but he’s had some problems there, too, and owes the owner several thousand dollars. The couple’s landlords, Bruce and Davorka Miller, have leased their home to the Cowpers for two years while the Millers have moved to Florida. But after a hurricane destroyed the home and all their possessions, the Millers have returned to Philadelphia with a plan to move back into their house and evict the Cowpers. Hanging on by only Imani’s nursing salary and the validity of the lease, James needs to get back in his wife’s good graces and also find a rare piece of art that will give him some financial security. But the Millers have house keys and are not the kind of people who will take no for an answer. Kay’s enjoyable novel has a robust plot that captures her headstrong characters’ mad dash to stay afloat in rapidly gentrifying Philadelphia. They all carry so much baggage that their eventual collision with one another in the story’s hilarious third act makes for a truly madcap dinner party like no other. The issues are many, but the dialogue is full of wit and gives clear insight into the characters’ obstinate and oftentimes amusing psyches. James is very British, but he’s after something uniquely American, and his thorny journey is written with charm and vitality.
A clever, timely tale about desperate people maneuvering through a tricky situation.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-8381914-0-5
Page Count: 285
Publisher: Darley Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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