A winning depiction of a modern spiritual quest, even if Grace’s speedy transformation to in-demand guru is a bit too smooth.
In the second novel from London-resident Gray (Ten Men, 2005), a successful British pharmaceutical rep gives up her lucrative career to train as a yoga instructor.
For elegant 40-year-old Grace (the daughter of two physicians) the healthcare profession was an obvious choice, whether or not it particularly suited her. As a legal “drug dealer” shilling antidepressants to doctors, she takes refuge from her hectic city life in the yoga studio, under the ministrations of quirky “Swami P,” who shows her that there really is more to the world than material possessions and quick-fix happy pills. Yoga, which also led her to her handsome unemployed actor boyfriend Harry, inspires Grace to quit her job and pursue a simpler life teaching yoga to others. To that end she signs up for a teacher training course in Southern California, right before dumping the leechy Harry, who was probably cheating on her anyway. Then it’s off to groovy Malibu where she bonds with an assortment of fellow devotees. She also carries on a sweetly intimate correspondence with Dr. James, an attractive (single) psychiatrist back in England who, like Grace, has begun to have doubts about Western medicine and the path his life has taken. Their romantic potential is thwarted, though, when he jets off to Vietnam to study alternative medicine just as she is returning to London. Back at home she quickly picks up a variety of clients ranging from pampered rich women to hard case National Health patients referred to her by a frustrated doctor. These reluctant yogis, who suffer from a variety of mental and physical ailments, challenge Grace’s confidence, as does aging supermodel Collette, who hopes that yoga will help her to conceive. It soon becomes clear to all her students that Grace is a natural—so good that an A-list movie star tries to lure her to New York. But what about Dr. James? Liberally peppered with yogic terms and philosophy, Gray’s drolly funny novel favors Grace’s internal transformation over dramatic plot.
A winning depiction of a modern spiritual quest, even if Grace’s speedy transformation to in-demand guru is a bit too smooth.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-87113-986-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
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
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.
An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).
Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.Pub Date: April 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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