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Book Author(s): Virginia Evans

The Correspondent

The Correspondent book cover

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Sybil Van Antwerp has been writing letters for most of her 70-something years of life. She writes to close friends, to family, to former colleagues, and even to celebrities and well-known authors whose books she has enjoyed. She strikes up conversations via email (when necessary to use that newer format) with customer service representatives.

She’s lived a full life, having been married and mothered three children and had a successful career as a lawyer. But in these later years of her life, she does seem to have settled into a more limited routine. While she won’t talk about it with most of her friends and family, she does mention to the strangers she writes to that her eyesight is going. That will, of course, put a damper on her reading and writing habits.

A series of letters come to her from someone in her past that bring up a painful period of her life, making her re-examine it and assess what she can or should do now.

Sybil’s story in The Correspondent is exclusively told through her letters to others and some of their letters to her. I think I had already observed that epistolary books aren’t my favorite style, and this confirmed it. I had heard one Instagrammer whose tastes seem to line up with mine gush over this book twice, so I picked it up. It is a sweet story, but I think a different style/ format would have worked better for me personally. However, I did enjoy the last 20 percent or so, where you can really see Sybil opening up and blossoming a bit at this stage of her life. That’s always a nice theme I enjoy in books.

I can definitely recommend The Correspondent, and you may very well enjoy it even more than I did, especially if you do like this style of crafting a story. And it’s pretty clean, so it’s a solid read for anyone.

Rated: Mild. Profanity includes fewer than 10 instances of moderate profanity, a dozen uses of mild language, and about a dozen instances of the name of Deity in vain. Some mentions of sex and kissing, but no scenes, details or extensive talk about it. Talk about a child dying in an accident.

Click here to purchase your copy of The Correspondent on Amazon. 

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