A lean, powerful novel about war’s psychological aftermath.
A Midwestern woman struggles through challenges with her shellshocked WWI veteran husband in Lewis’ historical novel.
Milton is a young man from Missouri who’s about to be shipped off to Europe to fight in World War I. He and his fellow young recruits are uncertain what the future holds as they arrive in France. The trenches don’t see much action, and Milton and his compatriots play many games of cards. When the inevitable attack comes, an injured Milton is briefly taken away for medical treatment. (“Two days’ respite, then bandaged, limping, gun in hand, he’s sent back to the trenches on a supply wagon.”) After a more serious attack, Milton is returned home, and his war is over. In Enterprise, Kansas, a young woman named Edith meets some men who’ve been hired to work in the fields. Milton is among them, and Edith, who is privately worried about winding up an old maid, takes a liking to him. He reciprocates, and they get married, but there’s a problem: Milton appears able to work in the fields and at the mercantile, but he is shellshocked. Doctors working in the fledgling field of psychology urge him to suppress his memories, and Milton is at times checked into hospitals. Milton and Edith have kids, but a long-delayed pension isn’t enough to live on, and Milton continues to struggle. The couple fights to find a way to stay together and survive despite difficult odds. In Lewis’ postwar novel, the author draws from her family’s history to craft the story of Milton and Edith, and the narrative is both concise and full of detail. Whether depicting the battlefield or the Great Plains, the author excels at setting the scene and describing the emotional connections the characters have to places and to other people. The suffering of WWI returnees was doubtlessly immense, and the help they received was minimal; through this personal story, Lewis illuminates that pain and how affecting it was for those who loved the sufferers.
A lean, powerful novel about war’s psychological aftermath.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781881163763
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Miami University Press
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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