A family saga whose execution doesn’t quite match its ambition.
Three generations of Seattle women navigate bigotry, politics, and scheming men.
Kohnstamm’s second novel opens with a setup that at first seems too thin to carry even a short story: In 2014, Sami Hasegawa-Stalworth has volunteered to run her children’s elementary school PTA in hopes of renaming the school after her grandmother, Masako Hasegawa, a victim of Japanese American internment and a longtime music teacher there. But that small effort turns out to unlock a host of complications. It evokes the history of the school’s original namesake, an East Coast settler who scammed the native tribes in the 1850s. It implicates an effort by another local, Bruce Jorgensen, to convert a nearby property into a pot dispensary—if only he can game the license-lottery system in his favor. It harks back to Sami’s mother, Ruth Hasegawa, who endured Masako’s strict upbringing in the 1970s even while pursuing a romance with Larry Dugdale, a ne’er-do-well who’s pinned his future on a local aerospace company’s plan to manufacture a fleet of supersonic passenger jets. And naturally, it goes all the way back to Masako herself, a passionate music teacher. Bouncing from the middle of the 19th century to the present day, Kohnstamm capably occupies the dynamic of characters in multiple eras while spotlighting commonalities—most prominently the complex (sometimes bigoted) bureaucracies of the city, and the stumblebum manner of men and get-rich-quick ideas. But Kohnstamm seems to be shooting for an epic scope that the novel never quite achieves, as it’s generally stuck in the middle gear of chronicling sputtering relationships. That means some late-breaking dramas involving marriage, mental illness, and an attempted plane hijacking feel less persuasive. As a series of individual domestic dramas, it has liveliness and ironic humor. But its parts are less than its whole.
A family saga whose execution doesn’t quite match its ambition.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781640096813
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
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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