As clean prose dissects messy lives, these stories combine an empathetic heart with acute understanding.
A collection of stories that find politics gone crazy, girls and women navigating their ways through social media minefields, and identity refracted through celebrity culture.
The title story generated considerable attention when it appeared in the New Yorker in 2017. On one level it's about a father’s attempts to decipher the life of his 12-year-old daughter through her Instagram posts, some of which appear to be suggestive, or maybe that’s just to him. Here's one: “New post: a pair of lips, shining wetly.” Another: “New Instagram post: a peeled-off pair of ballet tights, splayed on the white tiles of a bathroom floor.” Just what is it she’s trying to communicate, and with whom? When he tries to talk with his daughter, she's often silent or, perhaps worse, complains that she has no friends. Beyond the father-daughter relationship, the story, set against a backdrop of a dysfunctional culture whose presidential election defies understanding, captures a more general malaise. So many of the stories here are about trying to understand, failing to connect, and interpreting the signs from a relentless barrage of media. The stories evoke myth (“The Erlking”), fairy tales (“Young Wife’s Tale”), and science fiction (“The Burglar”), with dreamlike reveries that find protagonists not quite clear on what they're experiencing, let alone what it means. Throughout, Bynum combines a firm command of tone (often warm, even when dark) with precise detail. In "Many a Little Makes," the longest story and the collection’s centerpiece, a woman named Mari gets a long text from an old friend and finds it reviving all sorts of memories of girls on the cusp of adolescence, how a few years found them changing so dramatically in different ways, how boys and parents complicated the relationship. Bynum's characters struggle to determine who they are, how they are, and how they were, in a distant time before smartphones and cyber-media.
As clean prose dissects messy lives, these stories combine an empathetic heart with acute understanding.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-19194-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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