Although the plot reads like a soap opera, De Witt’s prose is nuanced and her characters are finely shaded.
A story about growing up with a distant father and an ineffectual mother in Austin, Texas, in the 1970s and '80s.
Molly Moore’s father is a Circuit Court judge, intellectually prepossessing but emotionally reserved. De Witt’s narrative begins with his death and then gives us flashbacks into Molly’s growing up, moving away and their eventual reconciliation. As a young girl Molly never quite fits in, in part because, like her father, she’s extremely smart—though not as brilliant as her best friend Becky Lopez. Molly and Becky manage to negotiate their adolescence in the usual painful ways, with crushes on boys, negative body images and unanswerable questions about their future. As a tween Molly becomes enamored with Keith Miller, but like many pubescent romances, this one fades—though she’s still hurt when Keith makes Becky pregnant their senior year of high school. Molly goes on to Harvard, while Becky decides to give birth to her baby, a daughter she names Kate. While at Harvard Molly sleeps around, anywhere from one-night stands to a more enduring, and heartbreaking, relationship with Joe Price, a charming liar who’s never been to college. In her sophomore year Molly gets pregnant, has an abortion, leaves Joe (by mutual consent) and drops out of Harvard, becoming—rather unconvincingly—a cleaning woman for Cambridge society women. This she does for 14 years, sleeping “with more men than [she] can remember,” until she discovers she’s once again pregnant. This time she decides to keep the child, whom she names Zim. Then, under a cloud of scandal, Molly discovers that her father had allegedly tried to help Becky’s daughter Kate, who’s become a street kid and part-time prostitute. When Kate is killed in a wreck while Judge Moore is driving, it becomes clear that his interest in her was more than paternal. Molly finally, and painfully, reconciles with her father, now dying of cancer.
Although the plot reads like a soap opera, De Witt’s prose is nuanced and her characters are finely shaded.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-9826171-4-4
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Lorimer Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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