Evening spins a complicated web of loving, twisted relationships in which the ties that bind are weakening and there is no center ... She limns the emotion of every action, cutting straight to the heart. Eve’s inner life is on full display, but the novel’s real drama and magic comes from Eve’s relationships with others.
Like a darker, sexier Little Women, it excavates a seemingly saccharine family dynamic to reveal the tangled knot of obligations and entitlements, admirations and resentments, that underpin the closest of sibling bonds ... Little Women is a compelling book because it shows how external conditions, namely economic powerlessness, make it difficult for women to live up to contemporary ideals of selfless sisterhood. Rapoport takes that argument a step further, suggesting that such ideals are fictions and that sisterhood at its core is a combative, even destructive bond ... It’s difficult to write about competitive sisters without dipping into stereotypes of women as essentially venal and self-serving, ugly step-sisters forever sabotaging each other. Rapoport accomplishes the task deftly by combining the languorous scenes of childhood with gladiatorial language that evinces Eve’s discomfort with her sister ... That oscillation between nostalgia and simmering conflict functions better in Rapoport’s lush evocations of Eve’s memories than in her dialogue, whose sentences are so snappy and polished it’s hard to believe that people uttered them over coffee and cake ... a denouement that’s a little too swift to credit.
...smart, darkly funny ... Rapoport’s prose crackles with wit...and erotic heat ... Suffused with deep feeling, Rapoport’s narrative boldly faces the darkness that can fuel sisterly rivalry.
Rapoport’s tightly structured novel uses the seven-day Jewish mourning ritual to delve claustrophobically into Eve’s psychology and the family history that shaped it ... Was Tam as perfect as she seemed? Who envied whom? Can Eve make better choices? These questions, both familiar and overworked, will all resolve themselves neatly as suggestions of moral lapses are excused by extenuating circumstances, and a couple of surprises help other issues melt away ... The scenario is sympathetic but the conceptual bones poke too visibly through this novel’s narrative skin.
