This glittering noirish tragedy, with its lushly imagined period landscape and subtle feminist trajectory, is both fun to...
The daughter of two beautiful losers—a snakebit Jewish gambler and a chorus girl—comes of age in late 1930s Los Angeles and early 1950s Las Vegas.
A blonde, blue-eyed child of 6, Esme Silver has not yet been enrolled in school, which doesn't mean she’s not getting an education. She spends her days on the MGM lot with her mother and at the track with her father; she’s known to the regulars at both places. One of her rituals is to purchase lunch at the track’s concession stand for her father and herself, four hot dogs for 40 cents; the counter lady often combs out her hair and washes her face. “I can only imagine what compelled her ministrations, what I must have looked like, hair unbrushed, shirt on backwards, my neck strung with a hundred necklaces in imitation of my mother, a silk flower pinned to my wild coiffure.” In one track of this story, 20-year-old Esme recalls the events of 1939 that culminated in her moving with her father to Las Vegas, where he was employed by Ben “Bugsy” Siegel. The second track follows Esme’s own career in Vegas, which takes off when she's noticed at age 15 by Nate Stein, an ambitious and ruthless Jewish gangster. Stein is fictional, but many of the characters are real, including cameos by Judy Garland, the Andrews Sisters, and Busby Berkeley. Sharp’s (The True Memoirs of Little K, 2010) research shines in her detailed descriptions of the MGM productions Esme’s mother plays in and the Vegas extravaganzas that feature Esme herself. “The Stardust’s…stage was larger than a basketball court, with an Esther Williams–like swimming tank for summer shows and Sonja Henie–like skating rink for winter ones. The pipes secreted in the catwalks created rain or snow on demand.” If you liked Jennifer Egan's Manhattan Beach, this novel offers a similarly immersive mid-20th-century experience, featuring a heroine as interesting, tough, and tragic as Egan’s Anna Kerrigan, with similar Daddy issues and gangland connections.
This glittering noirish tragedy, with its lushly imagined period landscape and subtle feminist trajectory, is both fun to read and sad to think about.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-268483-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
PROFILES
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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
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