A bighearted novel about the past’s refusal to recede.
In Bornstein’s debut novel, an American Jew’s story unfolds simultaneously across two timelines.
Born in Paris to Jews from Poland and Morocco and raised in both Israel and Brooklyn, the polyglot Bram Goodman represents the whole of the Diaspora. In 1983, Bram, recently discharged from the Israeli Defense Force and fresh from a summer in Côte d’Azur teaching wealthy children to swim, has just returned to his semi-hometown of New York City. He’s followed a girl there: Liz Ellis, an idealistic Columbia Law grad (and gentile) from Arizona who’s just taken a job at a legal nonprofit. Falling in love with Liz helps distract Bram from the fact that he hasn’t yet grappled with the death of his Israeli cousin, Yoni, who died by suicide following their service in the Lebanon War. In 2015, 32 years later, a middle-aged Bram occupies an entirely different position in life. He and Liz are living in Queens with three kids and a pair of ornery upstairs tenants. Bram serves as the executive director of The Linden Hills Community House, located in a mostly Black neighborhood of south Brooklyn. His progressive 17-year-old daughter, Jenna, is critical of all things Israel, while his youngest, Theo, is preparing to undergo his bar mitzvah. The specter of a Trump presidency hangs in the air, as does the ghost of Yoni, whose death—and what it means—Bram still hasn’t fully worked out. Tied up in Bram’s grief is a never-realized dream Yoni had for the two of them to swim the English Channel (“A two-way, back and forth,” he explains. “We’d be the first Israeli cousins to do so”). The novel alternates between the two timelines, which mirror and inform each other in unexpected ways, moving Bram (and the reader) inevitably back to Israel.
The author has an observant eye, summoning both eras of New York in brilliant detail and persuasively depicting the same characters at very different times of life. The dialogue is particularly sharp and laden with dark humor, as when Bram dismisses Theo’s worry that any Jews in New York would vote for Donald Trump: “ ‘Dylan Mandelbaum told me his father thinks Trump would be good for Israel.’ ‘Dylan Mandelbaum’s father would probably go to Dr. Mengele for a second opinion.’ ” At one point Bram praises Philip Roth, and Bram’s preoccupations—how to be both an Israeli Jew and a secular American progressive with a shiksa wife—feel very much of the generation raised on Roth’s novels. It’s possible that younger readers will not find these concerns quite so compelling. There are some pacing issues as well: The book is long at 470 pages, and its plot accumulates more than unfurls. Even so, scene by scene, chapter by chapter, the novel is a pleasure to read. At all times, the writing displays a keen wit and a deep sense of history. It’s a great novel of New York in the Trump era and a tender look at the way the progression of time makes immigrants of us all.
A bighearted novel about the past’s refusal to recede.Pub Date: May 30, 2023
ISBN: 979-8886790382
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Luminare Press
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2023
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
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.
A high school senior pursues an affair with her teacher.
Seventeen-year-old Waldo, the narrator of McCurdy’s fiction debut, lives in Anchorage, Alaska, with her mother, though she’s long been the parent in their relationship. She heats her own frozen meals and pays the bills on time while her mom chases man after man and makes well-meaning promises she never keeps. Waldo blows her Victoria’s Secret wages on online shopping sprees and binges on junk food, inevitably crashing after the fleeting highs of her indulgences. Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher, has “thinning hair and nose pores”; he’s 40 years old and married with a child. Nevertheless—or possibly as a result?—Waldo’s attraction to him is “instant. So sudden it’s alarming. So palpable it’s confusing.” Mr. Korgy professes to want to keep their friendship aboveboard, but after a sexual encounter at the school’s winter formal that she initiates, an affair begins. Will this reckless pursuit be the one that actually satisfies Waldo, and is she as mature as she thinks she is? Waldo is a keen observer of people and provides sharp commentary on the punishing work of female beauty. Readers of McCurdy’s bestselling memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died (2022), will surely be curious about the tumultuous mother-daughter relationship, and it is one of the novel’s highlights, full of realistic pity and anger and need. (“I want to scream at her. I want her to hug me.”) Unfortunately, the prose is often unwieldy and sometimes downright cringeworthy: When Waldo tells Mr. Korgy she loves him, “The words hang in the air in that constipated way they do when you know that you shouldn’t have said them.” Waldo frequently lists emotions and adjectives in triplicate, and events that could be significant aren’t sufficiently explored or given enough space to breathe before the novel races on to the next thing.
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593723739
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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