A lyrical meditation on power, need, and love.
Two women are roiled by loss and desire.
Smith returns to Rome, the setting of her novel The Everlasting (2020), to render, in luminous prose, the lives of two unnamed women, a century apart, grieving, angry, and defiant. Each is engaged in botanical data collection: One, in 1854, assists British botanist Richard Deakin, who aims to record every species of plant growing in the Colosseum. Her father, outraged because she fell in love with a woman, indentured her to Deakin as punishment. In 2018, another woman combs the Colosseum: a graduate student from Mississippi working for a demeaning academic adviser, assigned to compare Deakin’s catalog with flora of the present day. Both women are haunted by loss: one, of her lover, who married; the other, of her mother, an amateur naturalist, who died when she was 15. Her mother taught her that plants “meant something. Not just in the doctrine-of-signatures way, or the yellow-rose-for-friendship way,” but in a deeply spiritual way. The only proof of beauty, her mother believed, “was a piece of living green pushing through a coffin of spring soil.” Smith makes deft use of Deakin’s Flora of the Colosseum of Rome, published in 1855, which combined meticulous botanical descriptions with information on each plant’s medicinal, culinary, and even literary significance. The women collectors are acutely sensitive to shape, texture, and odor and alert, as well, to plants’ cultural connotations and metaphorical richness: “Some plants, like lovers, are parasitical,” one collector reflects. “Naming carries bias, or bias worms its way to names.” The contemporary collector is enraged by the effects of climate change and rampant tourism on the ecology of the Colosseum. Both women rail against the arrogance and sexism that circumscribe their lives: “What does it take,” they ask, “to survive in this world, as a woman, as a weed?” The book is illustrated with delicate drawings by Schermer-Gramm.
A lyrical meditation on power, need, and love.Pub Date: April 18, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-374-60547-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
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
Great crime fiction.
An apparent suicide threatens to destroy an Irish farm town in the final volume of French’s Cal Hooper trilogy.
In the fictional western Ireland townland of Ardnakelty, “there’s a girl going after missing.” Soon young Rachel Holohan is found dead in the river. Shortly before, she had stopped at Lena Dunne’s home, and nothing had seemed amiss. The medical examiner determines she’d swallowed antifreeze, and he presumes she then fell from a bridge into the water. The medical examiner and the town agree she’d died by suicide. But there is far more to the plot: 16-year-old Trey Reddy thinks Tommy Moynihan murdered Rachel. Moynihan doles out favors and punishments to the local townsfolk, who know it’s best not to cross him. Now rumors spread that Moynihan wants land and has a secret plan to forcibly buy up parcels from the locals. A factory will be built, or a great big data center, or who knows what. If Tommy’s son, Eugene, can get elected to the local council, then compulsory purchase orders for land will follow, and the farms will disappear. Eugene, who’d been romantically involved with Rachel, is wonderfully described as “on the weedy edge of good-looking” and just fine as long as you “don’t have high expectations in the way of chins.” Lena is engaged to the American Cal Hooper, an ex-cop turned woodworker. They are “more or less raising” Trey, and these three core characters are drawn into the mystery of Rachel’s death and may have to face the looming clouds of civilizational change for Ardnakelty. Lena is chastised for “asking your wee questions all round the townland,” and Trey wants to quit school, against Cal’s advice. Finally, the story’s best line: “You can’t go killing people just because they deserve it.”
Great crime fiction.Pub Date: March 31, 2026
ISBN: 9780593493465
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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