An earnest attempt to excavate human truths that stays too much on the surface.
In Prince’s novel, a sentient house built in turn-of-the-century Baltimore bears witness to a century of human life and history.
A family’s home is a vessel for their experiences—marriages, children, holiday gatherings, and conversations shared at the dinner table. For a series of families in early-20th-century Baltimore, a rowhouse in the Mount Vernon neighborhood is a family member in its own right. The house (843 N Charles Street, as it calls itself) serves as the novel’s narrator as it learns about both the broad strokes and the minutiae of human behavior across generations, like an alien learning the ways of a new planet. Its first residents, a family headed by George and Margaret Heinrich, teach it the value of holidays, the first sparks of young love, and, rather clunkily, the mechanics of masturbation and sex. The next family, the Ferrettis, helps expand its sense of local and international politics as the First World War, Prohibition, and the suffrage movement rattle the Ferrettis’ patriarch. In the World War II era, it’s the DuBois family that allows the house to explore the nuances of human sexuality, the nascent gay rights movement, the Cold War, and advancements in technology. By the 1960s, the house has become divided into two units, and 843 begins to grapple with issues of race and class in its now-integrated neighborhood.
While the house makes silent remarks rendered in italics, its tenants exist almost entirely in their dialogue, feeding the dwelling a steady diet of current events, gossip, joy, and grief. Stylistic constraints like this are hard to pull off—and Prince, unfortunately, fails to create a compelling narrator or human characters who have more to offer than dinner-table chatter. The author clearly intends the house, as a blank-slate observer, to serve as a vehicle for providing insights into the human condition, but it doesn’t have much to say that has not been said before, and better (“that raises the question, what does ‘alive’ really mean”; “Is prejudice really more about race or just different life experiences? How does prenatal care, health care, nutrition, stability, and education come into this?”). Some of the humorous moments, mostly regarding sex, raise a chuckle (“so that is what has been going on under the sheets. The male protrusion fits the female indentation”), but the logic of the sentient house is inconsistent; in the same chapter, it can easily grasp the concepts of railroads and fashion trends while still not understanding why human beings grow from children to adults. There are time jumps between most of the chapters, so the characters don’t receive sufficient time to truly develop, and their conversations rarely offer anything substantive about their feelings and relationships as the world changes around them. (The overreliance on dialogue highlighting historical events and expository narration blunts the emotional response of the reader.) Prince’s novel is ambitious and inventive, but by the end of the story, the house has merely acquired a large collection of facts—not a compelling understanding of what “alive” really means.
An earnest attempt to excavate human truths that stays too much on the surface.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2025
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
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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