CBR Bingo: Bird, because this has birds on the cover (that counts, right?)
hot take: This book grows up and becomes Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine.
longer take: so that’s the wrong title entirely and the wrong book, and now I’ve read the Wikipedia summary for said book I’m not going to go read it. Whoops all around. The book I was actually thinking about is Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, which is also about a slightly unpleasant older woman who’s reckoning with her past and how it’s impacted her relationships in the present. I still think that this book is less assured in making its main character unlikeable, probably (entirely a guess) because Evans is a debut author and so gives in to the audience’s desires for a HEA/HFN ending?
EITHER WAY, that all sounds like I’m critiquing the book but I’m really not! If anything, this was the book that finally snapped me out of my meh reading spell, and it’s all the sweeter for having showed up in my life during Bookclub on Tour: Bristol Edition (i.e., a weekend away that I planned with my London-based book group). Once I started reading this–getting over my preconceived notions around epistolary novels, the blurb, the aggressively sincere tone–I literally couldn’t put it down. Even though I could slightly tell where it was going most of the time (I mean, Sybil is adopted and is gifted a 23andme type test, what did you think was going to happen) I was still on the edge of my seat.
Our main character, Sybil Van Antwerp, has written letters her entire life to everyone she can think of. Joan Didion, for example, is a regular correspondent, simply because one day Sybil sent her a letter and she replied. She’s also a retired law clerk, but from an era when that was basically the highest aspiration that was available to women–in fact, she and the judge she worked alongside were a legal powerhouse. But now she is retired, divorced, and largely alone but for her letters and some interesting characters that pop in and out of the novel.
Spoiler: a pet does die, and it is Sybil’s fault.
That being said, this is also a book where Sybil’s best intentions to understand and fix what’s gone on in her life largely lead to positive outcomes. Cynical literary reviewer me thinks that maybe that’s the easy way out (see above note) but book lover me was thrilled to see it.
