Women’s lives presented without apology or sugar-coating.
In Shah’s perceptive debut, a lifetime friendship between two Indian women is traced over the years and across oceans.
Twelve-year-old Deepa Jain and Ruchi Mehta meet at a Catholic girls’ school in India in 1962 when Ruchi transfers in after classes have started. Deepa takes the poorer and less worldly Ruchi under her wing to help her acclimate. The push-and-pull nature of their lifelong friendship develops early as Ruchi enjoys academic success, evoking feelings of jealousy in Deepa. By their older teens, a subtle but undeniable sexual attraction grows between the girls but is never discussed. Deepa marries and emigrates to the United States with her doctor husband. At her suggestion, Ruchi follows her to Connecticut, accompanied by her own husband, an engineer. The women’s friendship follows a tortuous course in their new home, complicated by differences in class and material success with Ruchi settling for a modest house and Deepa enjoying a more upscale home and, eventually, a beach house, too. Shah clearly and sensitively draws the awkwardness created by the disparities between the pair’s aspirations, ways of life, and economic privilege. The women’s disparate paths—Ruchi works in Deepa’s husband’s medical practice in order to make ends meet while Deepa dabbles at creating a cultural center for their expatriate community—are reflected in the lives of the growing group of Indian émigrés surrounding them. Shah highlights their differing choices in mothering, as well, through Deena’s hands-off approach to her daughter and Ruchi’s solicitude toward her son. When a moral quandary presents itself to one of the women—the resolution of which will have a huge impact upon the other—the complications presented by a lifetime of love, longing, and rivalry continue to haunt the friends. Shah deftly delivers a story full of parallelisms and contrasts in which the prickly humanity of her main characters is never softened.
Women’s lives presented without apology or sugar-coating.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781639733002
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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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