An engrossing, impressive debut novel that skillfully charts a young Frenchwoman’s coming-of-age.
A French teenager struggles to navigate her relationships with her famous parents in this moody bildungsroman.
Margot Louve’s life changes forever when she and her mother, Anouk, a successful stage actress, see her father’s wife outside a cafe in Paris. Suddenly, Margot begins to question the secret life that her father, Bertrand Lapierre, the French Minister of Culture, and her formidable, unconventional mother have built together. Though Margot adores her father, who remains a frequent presence in her life, his identity must remain a secret to the rest of the world. When faced with the reality of his other, public life and family, Margot begins to yearn for her father to leave his wife and takes a reckless step to encourage him to do so. This debut novel by Lemoine, a French Japanese writer who currently lives in New York, explores Margot’s relationships not only with her parents, but also with Brigitte and David, two older, married journalists with whom she develops an ambiguous, sexually fraught relationship. Lemoine excels at teasing out the ambivalent contours of relationships between teenagers and adults. At 17, Margot teeters between childhood and adulthood: Both insightful and immature, she is eager to be treated like a grown-up. Frustrated by adults who treat her like a child, she is drawn to people who seem to take her seriously. But these relationships are not straightforward, and as the book progresses, Margot reevaluates her ideas about Brigitte, David, and her parents. Though the novel is largely concerned with Margot’s interior emotional state, it moves at a satisfyingly quick pace, and Lemoine’s prose is visually and emotionally precise: “If she abandoned me,” Margot thinks of Anouk, “I’d have a concrete reason to blame her, other than this confused feeling of unhappiness.”
An engrossing, impressive debut novel that skillfully charts a young Frenchwoman’s coming-of-age.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-984854-43-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
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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