A deeply intelligent examination of the ties that both define and bind our lives.
A reimagining of The Brothers Karamazov with three Korean American sisters in the titular roles.
Minah, Sarah, and Esther Kim are raised under the shadow of their father Eugene’s extreme cruelty. The eldest, Minah, was born to a different mother than the younger two, but she’s raised alongside them under the insufficient care of their terminally ill mother, Jeonghee, while the girls’ father uses her as a target for his frequent rages. After Jeonghee’s death, Minah distances herself from her family and eventually becomes a successful lawyer who “feel[s] most spiritual" when putting on makeup or new clothes. Minah plans to extend the sensual joy she takes in the world to the experience of having children and is bending her will toward finding a man who will enable these future plans. Sarah, the middle child and her father’s favorite, is brilliant, an Ivy League graduate who finds herself cynically alienated from a society she sees as filled with “suffering and sadism and selfishness.” Alone of the sisters, Esther has drifted out into the world without a plan to govern her future decisions, and yet has managed to keep an essential compassion for humanity, including her increasingly abusive father, even through the deprivations of her wanderings. The sisters lose touch as adults, but they’re brought back into daily contact when Eugene announces not only that he’s dying, but that the Sisters K have a long-lost illegitimate brother whom they must factor into their plans for their eventual inheritance. As the sisters negotiate their philosophical views on pleasure and suffering, rage and shame, duty and freely given love, Sun patiently translates the core values of Dostoevsky’s timeless work into the idioms of late capitalism, where the sisters’ available identities are refracted through the prism of not one but two paternalistic societies—Korean and American. The result is a book that does far more than retell a classic tale: it constructs a whole new vocabulary to discuss the most central of human conundrums: how to love and be loved in return.
A deeply intelligent examination of the ties that both define and bind our lives.Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9781961884069
Page Count: 393
Publisher: Unnamed Press
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
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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