Bronwasser makes the banal exceptional with an eye that not only looks but sees.
Bronwasser’s second novel takes a studied look at how “the banal and the exceptional” interact in the lives of three relative strangers.
Although the author insists that “every story rests on three points,” two of her three linchpins never meet. Florence da Silva teaches photography at an unnamed university in the Netherlands, traveling to Paris only briefly when her rising fame demands it. Damaged middle manager Philippe Lambert, on the other hand, rarely leaves the city, even though his wife, Laurence, who works for Air France, travels the Continent extensively. Marie, their point of intersection, comes to Paris from the Netherlands after a shocking betrayal leads her to bury herself in the daily drudgery of work as an au pair. If Flo has taught Marie anything, it’s the difference between looking and seeing, and through her eyes, the reader discovers a Paris seldom visible. Scuttling back and forth between Philippe’s cramped apartment in the banlieue and her dreary servant’s room on the eighth floor of the building housing his parents’ spacious flat, she rides the Metro underneath the Champs-Élysées, attends language class near the Sorbonne, and walks Philippe and Laurence’s two children in the park, always adjacent to but never quite able to access the City of Light. Beneath Bronwasser’s tight narrative beats the drum of a sinister force that surfaces in the attacks that rock the city periodically between 1986 and 2015. More terrifying than anything the terrorists can concoct is the pain people can inflict on each other, whether from deliberate malice, toxic indifference, or horribly bungled efforts to forge a misguided connection. Between the banal and the extraordinary, the banal wins by a mile.
Bronwasser makes the banal exceptional with an eye that not only looks but sees.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780143138464
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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
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
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