The buzz about Virginia Evans’ first novel, The Correspondent, was hyperbolic. How could we not love a cute epistolary novel about a 73-year-old woman described by reviewers as “cantankerous,” “peevish,” and “feisty”?

Reader, beware. Cranky characters can be endearingly cute, yet they can also pall quickly. The heroine seems a bit quirkier at the beginning than in the middle, and an identity subplot takes us into (for her) more dangerous territory, and (for us) more conventional ground.

That said, the beginning is splendid. Sybil Van Antwerp, a retired lawyer and judge’s clerk, adores writing letters on high-quality stationery with her fancy fountain pen. She sits down at her desk four mornings a week to write letters, and occasionally e-mails. She corresponds with her brother, children, friends, and famous people, including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Needless to say, she gets a lot of letters.

Surprisingly, she and Joan Didion have an extensive correspondence. Sybil sent her a fan letter, and they hit it off. It is fine for Evans to make up letters by the late Joan Didion: the problem is that the style is lacklustre, nothing like Didion’s.

The letters take different forms. Sibyl’s letter to Ann Patchett takes the form of a brilliant review of State of Wonder, a novel which, if I recall correctly, features 70-year-old women in a South American tribe getting pregnant and giving birth, which would have been my nightmare even in my forties. However, Sibyl thinks it is Patchett’s best novel, written at the height of her powers. Despite my own harsher critique, I was so impressed by Sibyl’s review that I hoped to see other letters in different forms: reviews, articles, minutes on the garden club, etc.

But, alas, we soon become mired in conventional family matters. There is something vaguely cable-TV when Sybil’s son gives her a DNA kit for Christmas: Sibyl was adopted when she was a year and a half, and had wonderful adoptive parents, so she has never investigated her background. Of course we know this is going to expand her world and she will interact with new family members and …

That said, I did not finish this novel. It is not without charm, and I think many readers will like it. But it isn’t quite right for me, and I stopped at page 71.