A nuanced and edifying angle on the fragility of early colonial life.
Freels offers a novel about a determined, widowed Dutch mother making her way in the North American colonies against the odds.
In 1630, Dutch colonists Anneke and Roelof arrive in New Amsterdam from the Netherlands. “We’re going to have to make our own rules and be very quick-witted and careful if we mean to survive,” Anneke says to her children. The family soon heads north to Fort Orange, where Roelof will work as a tenant farmer for Heer Van Rensselaer. There’s money to be made there, even if it will require years of hard work. All goes according to plan, more or less, until 1637, when Roelof dies suddenly of a snake bite. Anneke goes on to marry a local minister named Evert, who, due to his profession, is much more involved in Dutch colonial affairs than Roelof had been. As tensions rise in the rapidly growing community, both with the “Wilden” (as the Dutch referred to the land’s Indigenous inhabitants) and among the colonists, Anneke becomes better acquainted with the complex local disputes and struggles. Freels’ work tackles an oft-overlooked era of North American history, when the Dutch controlled modern-day Manhattan and Albany, among other areas. The story explores some aspects of this period that may be new to many readers, as when Heer Van Rensselaer insists on a Dutch form of government for his lands in which “a proper burgher council headed by a schout who would prosecute evildoing and five schepenen who would advise the director.” Anneke meets a wide range of people in this fledgling society, many of them trouble her in one way or another; one man she judges to be “annoying in the extreme,” while another is “arrogant and unpredictable.” Indeed, Anneke becomes bolder as the years go by, and many readers will enjoy seeing how she and those around her adjust and adapt to their transforming world.
A nuanced and edifying angle on the fragility of early colonial life.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9798896360322
Page Count: 208
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2025
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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