An intense and lyrical debut.
After losing a child, a woman attempts to start anew in a coastal town.
After her baby is stillborn—and unable to bear living in the apartment directly above her brother and his newborn son, whose cries remind her daily of her loss—37-year-old Mara has only one goal: “to slip into a blind spot, to run out on her life.” She heads for a seaside town where she knows no one, determined to live as ruinously as possible. She drinks as much as she can, eats as little as possible, and sleeps sometimes on the beach, sometimes in strangers’ beds. With her financial resources dwindling, Mara takes a job in a wine shop and begins living surreptitiously in the store’s attic room. Her boss, Simon, is suffering too: His wife has left him, taking their young daughter. As Mara begins to warm to Simon, her character and her past begin to take shape: her childhood in Quebec with a difficult mother, an absent father, and a loyal younger brother; her relationship with her husband. Told in image-heavy, crystalline fragments of prose, sometimes only one or two sentences to a page, Freeman’s novel reads like a shattered mirror gradually being pieced together, though the reflection, as in real life, never comes perfectly clear. For much of the novel’s first half, Freeman keeps Mara as a cipher, less a character and more simply a vessel for grief and self-destructive impulses. But as Mara’s character sharpens into focus, the narrative restraint gives way in pieces like a sudden calving of ice. What is left is a portrait of a woman’s psyche pared to the core, to unsettling effect. As the narrator says of Mara: “She knows: if there is a mistake to be made, she will make it.”
An intense and lyrical debut.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5917-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
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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