Various monologues that don’t quite add up to a plot.
A recent college graduate from India embarks on her first year as a teacher in the U.S.
Pavitra moves from Philadelphia, where she earned her degree, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where a private school has agreed to sponsor her visa for a year. While she’s certified to teach physics, her passion is creative writing, and she’s also drafting her first novel. Over the course of the book, Pavitra has conversations with people of myriad backgrounds and ages: her landlord; her boss; her colleagues; friends from her time growing up in Bangalore to her college years in Pennsylvania; a cousin who visits Boston; a neighbor she dates; other teachers she meets at an education conference; and a more seasoned writer at an artists’ retreat. For some reason, these characters pontificate and confide in this young woman. She does little to elicit their engagement. Perhaps that’s the point; people talk at her at length—about Indian weddings, food, traffic, weather, caste, yoga, globalization, privilege, colonialism, home and belonging, cultural appropriation, norms, differences, expectations, and so much more—and Pavitra is there to receive it. The novel takes place in 2006, but aside from these soliloquies, the story does little to capture what those post 9/11 years felt like or offer any benefit of hindsight. As a high school teacher, Pavitra spends most of her time with teenagers who aren’t that much younger than she is, but author Sunder almost never shows her with them, even as Pavitra’s visa hinges on her performance as an educator in a system in which she was not educated. Toward the end of the book, Pavitra is accepted into a competitive artists retreat, though Sundar offers little about her artistic concerns or capabilities, not even a mention of what her writer’s statement or work sample might have entailed. Even meeting the book’s conceit on its own terms, too often it feels like the author is a ventriloquist using characters to share competing ideas from 20 years ago. Something dramatic finally happens at the end of the book, a big swing to be admired structurally, but one that has nowhere to land.
Various monologues that don’t quite add up to a plot.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781644453247
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.
A French art historian’s English-language fiction debut combines the story of a loving relationship between a grandfather and granddaughter with an enlightening discussion of art.
One day, when 10-year-old Mona removes the necklace given to her by her now-dead grandmother, she experiences a frightening, hour-long bout of blindness. Her parents take her to the doctor, who gives her a variety of tests and also advises that she see a psychiatrist. Her grandfather Henry tells her parents that he will take care of that assignment, but instead, he takes Mona on weekly visits to either the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, or the Centre Pompidou, where each week they study a single work of art, gazing at it deeply and then discussing its impact and history and the biography of its maker. For the reader’s benefit, Schlesser also describes each of the works in scrupulous detail. As the year goes on, Mona faces the usual challenges of elementary school life and the experiences of being an only child, and slowly begins to understand the causes of her temporary blindness. Primarily an amble through a few dozen of Schlesser’s favorite works of art—some well known and others less so, from Botticelli and da Vinci through Basquiat and Bourgeois—the novel would probably benefit from being read at a leisurely pace. While the dialogue between Henry and the preternaturally patient and precocious Mona sometimes strains credulity, readers who don’t have easy access to the museums of Paris may enjoy this vicarious trip in the company of a guide who focuses equally on that which can be seen and the context that can’t be. Come for the novel, stay for the introductory art history course.
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9798889661115
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
SEEN & HEARD
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