A realistic but slow-paced story about love, loss, and tenacity.
Forney explores one woman’s emotional turbulence in the years following the events of September 11, 2001, in Forney’s debut novel.
Erin and Daniel are a young couple who fall in love hard and fast in college. She’s from a tightly wound family from Texas with high expectations, and he comes from a large, more easygoing family in the Bronx. Despite their different backgrounds, “There was something about the two of them that fit. It was easy, comfortable.” After getting married, they move to New York City together, where Erin is a lawyer and Daniel works at an investment bank in the World Trade Center. However, an argument results in Erin’s going on vacation to Spain with a friend, rather than attending Daniel’s mother’s birthday party. While overseas, Erin witnesses the Twin Towers fall on a television in the hotel bar. Shock gives way to panic as she desperately tries to reach Daniel and get home. When Erin finally returns, the novel chronicles her stages of grief from denial to anger to self-destruction. As time passes, she increasingly abuses alcohol and pills to try to numb her pain and even considers suicide. After spending copious amounts of money on unnecessary items, she finally gets one of several wake-up calls that force her to reckon with her life. Over the course of the novel, Forney mostly follows Erin as she spirals out of control. The monotony of her self-destruction does accurately reflect the affect of a depressed person. However, it also affects the momentum of the narrative, which often feels excessively slow. Ultimately, though, the novel effectively relates a love story about a marriage that’s imperfect but everlasting, and about the guilt that comes when we survive and must keep on living. Toward the end of the novel, Erin reflects, “Freedom was her fate. It walked hand in hand with loneliness,” and readers follow her as she decides whether to let her spirit break or to find the strength to keep going.
A realistic but slow-paced story about love, loss, and tenacity.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64-742177-9
Page Count: 296
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2021
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
SEEN & HEARD
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
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