A lot of fun, and very smart about family, aging, and being Jewish.
A feisty French Jewish family takes a road trip to Auschwitz.
After the success of Jesse Eisenberg’s film A Real Pain, American readers seem ready to embrace a comic novel featuring a visit to a concentration camp. Reza, a French writer best known here for the plays God of Carnage and Art, brings her skill at high-energy dialogue to this story of three aging siblings, Jean, Serge, and Nana Popper, narrated by Jean. We meet him at the community pool where he’s taken his ex-girlfriend Marion’s 9-year-old son, Luc, to teach him to swim. “I’ve never been entirely sure who I am to him,” he comments, and the reader will need to pay close attention or find themselves in a similar boat with the throng of named characters who arrive in the pages that follow. For example, in describing the Sunday lunches held at their mother’s house before her recent death, Jean introduces a slew of family members: “Joséphine, Serge’s daughter, came to the doorstep every other week already exasperated. Victor, Nana and Ramos’s son, was training at the École Émile Poillot, the ‘Harvard of gastronomy,’ according to Ramos, who pronounces it ‘Harward.’” All these people are important, as are the culinary credentials of the mostly off-stage Victor, whose career options become a bone of contention among the extremely argumentative older generation. It is Joséphine who spearheads the family trip to Auschwitz; her father’s first reaction is indicative of the tone of the entire adventure: “You know, I paid through the nose for a course in eyebrows, and look where that’s gotten her, now she wants to go to Auschwitz, what’s wrong with this girl?” Like her cousin Victor’s, Joséphine’s employment goals are a hot topic in the family, but this family can argue about anything, and will, from the Judenrampe to the gas chamber to the Kraków Radisson and back. Final scenes in a hospital waiting room add poignancy to the mix.
A lot of fun, and very smart about family, aging, and being Jewish.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9781632064011
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Restless Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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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