Published By: Abacus
Pages: 240
Released On: 28/01/2027
An image appeared in her mind, a childhood memory she hadn’t known it contained: a conductor leaning over her on a train late at night, speaking to her in a language she didn’t speak, one of his eyes looking at her while the other stared, unblinking, straight through her. She felt her skin prickle everywhere at once.
Evelyn Lieberman has a busy social life and a close group of friends in her Florida retirement community. One of them recommends a novel by a famous British novelist, Simon Glaser, which she buys at the airport just a few weeks later. As she reads, she realises it is the story of her own childhood…
Born Evelyn Reiss in Vienna in 1931, she was sent away just before the outbreak of war and taken in by a single mother in Yorkshire, alongside a Polish boy named Szymon. Glaser’s novel is not fiction at all; he was the little boy she lived with in England, and Kindness tells the story of their time together, which ended when a prank they played on their foster mother went horribly wrong. But it also tells a story that she sometimes doesn’t recognise, including the real reason for their traumatic and abrupt separation.
Her life turned upside down, Evelyn is compelled to travel to London to find Simon and ask him why he changed a crucial detail about their shared story. The two agree to search for the house in Yorkshire where they spent a year together, so long ago. While this journey will provide Evelyn and Simon answers to lifelong mysteries about that time, it will also reveal new surprises about how those events have reverberated in the lives of others.
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and Abacus for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
I found this a little hard going to get into. The characters didn’t really wow me and there was something about them that irked me slightly, but I can’t say exactly why. I did like that the main cast of characters are older – we’re talking 70s/80s – but they’re not shoved into the background or seen as the comic relief. They have as much presence or right to be there as any younger character, particularly women. And I do admit that as the book went on, they did start to grow on me and Evelyn was a beautiful protagonist and she really carried the story along.
Alexis has written emotion very well without over-egging-the-pudding as it were. It’s not sickly and it doesn’t trivialise pain or sadness, but it feels very real, honest, familiar, and human.
I think the shorter page count was a good choice. It keeps it tidy whereas otherwise it might have been a bit drawn out and lose its impact. But it’s not a short book to fly through, it deserves to be savoured and appreciated.
It’s a quiet book, not a huge plot or shocks or thrills. It’s a character piece about family, friendships, losses, grief, and memory.
She’s found the right balance between the historical elements and the present scenes, giving them both enough time for the reader to get into. It does have the historical side to it but it doesn’t get too stuffy.
I don’t want to get too detailed here because I think it’s a book best gone into blind. But I read a lot of books set in or related to war, particularly WWII, and as enjoyable as they are, they can get a bit samey. But this gave a fresh perspective on it without losing the emotion and the sensitivity the story deserves.
The first of her books for me and it’s a strong one. It wasn’t perfect in my opinion, but powerful and interesting and I enjoyed it enough to want to check out her other work.
