Highly readable and provocative.
Reminiscent of Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life or the movie Sliding Doors, Freitas’ novel explores nine (but certainly not all) possible outcomes when a woman who has never wanted children marries a man who gradually decides he does.
Each of the nine "takes" begins with the same 2006 argument: Luke, a photographer, discovers Rose, a sociologist, is not taking the prenatal vitamins she'd agreed to. How the couple’s argument progresses—to have a baby or not—resolves differently with each telling. In carefully interwoven segments, which multiply as one choice leads to others, events sometimes diverge, sometimes overlap. In some versions Rose has a baby, in others she doesn't. In some cases Luke behaves badly, in some Rose does. Friends and relatives maintain their underlying roles whether they are Rose's or Luke’s parents, lovers for whom Rose or Luke may or may not leave the marriage, a child named Addie who may or may not be born. Luke always has one side of the argument, but the novel belongs to Rose, a feminist academic, and is told from her viewpoint. Although the plotlines continue until 2025, her perspective has a decidedly pre-2020 feel. Rose’s world is full of White professionally and educationally privileged millennial women who talk in philosophical terms about feminism and their battle to maintain control over their lives yet are unapologetically oblivious to real-world politics and suffering. Read today, following the maze of numbered takes becomes an addictive game, highly literate escapism, like watching The Queen’s Gambit. Which is not to say the novel shies away from difficult issues surrounding the position of motherhood in women’s lives. Rose complains she is “damned if she didn’t become a mother and damned if she does become one, too.” In one of her lives she realizes that while she doesn’t like motherhood, she loves her child. And in every version, Rose and her own mother’s relationship rings lovingly, if painfully, true.
Highly readable and provocative.Pub Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-98-488059-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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