jchant's profile picture

jchant 's review for:

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
5.0
emotional hopeful reflective sad medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Complicated
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Five stars! If you haven’t already guessed, this book made me cry. 

Sybil Van Antwerp is a woman of letters—literally. She has been a letter writer since her childhood, and this novel is a compendium of some those letters both written by her and to her, between 2012 and 2019. The letters are sometimes sweet, sometimes bitchy, sometimes heartbreakingly sad or angry, but all of them document a time in Sybil’s life when she comes to terms with previous events in her life that she has avoided confronting for years. I went through all of the emotions with her, and at the end, I wept with her and for her. Such a wonderful, cathartic novel!

The audiobook is exceptional. It has an ensemble cast, including several of my favorite narrators: Jane Oppenheimer, Mark Bramhall and Kimberly Farr, and a new favorite, Maggi-Meg Reed as Sybil.