The story of a Nazi collaborator in Norway and one of his victims fails to engage the emotions.
The Holocaust comes to Norway.
Though its stated goal is to preserve the story of Hirsch Komissar, the author's wife’s Jewish great-grandfather and the owner of a thriving boutique in Trondheim, Norway, before the German invasion in April 1940, Stranger’s fact-based novel is more a portrait of one of the collaborators who abetted the process of killing hundreds of that country’s Jews and others during the Holocaust. Arrested by the Germans in January 1942 for the offense of spreading news from the BBC, Hirsch is executed later that year in a Norwegian labor camp. Meanwhile, following his recruitment by the Nazis shortly after the invasion, Norwegian Henry Oliver Rinnan, the source of the information leading to Hirsch's arrest, skillfully infiltrates the nation’s resistance network and, with his accomplices, runs a ruthless interrogation operation out of a house that came to be known as the “Gang Monastery.” In an ironic twist, when Hirsch’s son and his family return from Sweden to Trondheim in 1948, they move into the former torture headquarters, where grisly evidence of Rinnan’s cruelty remains. Stranger employs an unusual storytelling technique, labeling each section with a letter of the alphabet, followed by a series of words—“A for accusation. A for arrest. A for all that will disappear and slide into oblivion”—that launches him into the pieces of nonchronological narrative that compose the novel. Not for lack of interest in Hirsch’s story, but seemingly more because of the better-documented record of Rinnan’s treachery and brutality, the novel’s focus shifts, gradually but unmistakably, to become the chronicle of an amoral man, motivated to kill by little more than greed, lust, and a desire for revenge for the torment inflicted on him as a child because of his small physical stature and his rural family’s poverty. While he doesn’t lack for vivid scenes, Rinnan never comes close to qualifying as a truly complex or tragic figure, and the tragedy of Hirsch’s death never fully comes to life.
The story of a Nazi collaborator in Norway and one of his victims fails to engage the emotions.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-65736-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
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
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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