Exploring all kinds of love and domestic drama, this genre-defying high-wire act is one to savor.
The healing power of family and romantic love vie for center stage in Dev’s captivating dramedy.
Simi and Rupi Naik are estranged sisters, Indian immigrants to the U.S. who find love and salvation through a dramatic sacrifice. Simi has built an enviable life in rural Kentucky, with a nursing career that suits her (even if she has to work three jobs to sustain it) and the love of Prem Gupta, a good man who can’t wait to make her part of his prosperous and loving clan—all of which she’s terrified of losing because of her past. Bearing the brunt of the troubles that forced them to flee Mumbai, older sister Rupi has it much harder. She hasn’t put down roots and wields words like daggers to keep people at bay. The distance between the sisters narrows when Rupi’s boss at an LA tattoo parlor, the man who secured her travel visa before stealing her wages, dies, and his widow steals Rupi’s passport. Robbed of her meager belongings on a cross-country bus, a desperate Rupi shows up at Simi’s workplace in the throes of a raging bacterial infection, needing help from the sister she hasn’t seen in years. When she faints and later wakes in a hospital bed, she’s at risk of being deported to a country in which she may face serious charges. Rupi’s solution is to pressure Simi to get her would-be fiancé, Prem, to marry her instead and get her a green card. Since Rupi doesn’t believe in love or the sweetness of a guy like Prem, she’s demanding something she can’t believe will come to fruition—but Prem agrees. If that sounds heavy, it is. Rupi compares her plight to “a true-to-life Hindi soap opera in the middle of small-town southern Kentucky." Alternating between Simi and Rupi’s narratives, Dev blunts the darker aspects, focusing on the aftermath rather than directly depicting traumatic events, allowing that heaviness to coexist alongside Bollywood melodrama and romance.
Exploring all kinds of love and domestic drama, this genre-defying high-wire act is one to savor.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781662524301
Page Count: 319
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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