A uniquely cohesive collection of short examinations of aging, death, and living, these stories are subtly moving and...
MacLeod, who was born in Montreal and lives in Britain, merges fact and fiction in her new collection of short stories, her first book to be published in the U.S. since her debut novel, The Changeling (1996).
Wide-ranging and haunting, this collection seamlessly blends memoir, biography, and imagination to create narratives that explore the edges of reality and the ghosts that exist there. Death looms large, either as a threat or a perspective through which the characters view the nature of time. The opening story, “The Thaw,” outlines the final day of a young Canadian woman’s life and the legacy of grief she becomes part of when she dies unexpectedly. In "Sylvia Wears Pink in the Underworld" and “Dreaming Diana: Twelve Frames,” the losses of celebrities are examined through the lens of the author's own connection to Sylvia Plath and Princess Diana, two women turned into public spectacles and pop-culture icons. The title story, about Angelica Garnett, and “Oscillate Wildly” are moving looks back at lives near their end, while “The Heart of Denis Noble” melds science and passion as a man receives a new heart. Two of the collection’s standout stories are “There are precious things” and “In Praise of Radical Fish.” The former is a character study of the passengers on an Underground train, all of whom connect and react to one another over the course of a brief ride that highlights the humanity in a crowd. The latter is a funny and tense look at three would-be jihadis on a day at Brighton, where their fears and doubts about an upcoming mission come to the surface. All these stories are written in striking prose that seamlessly blends the real with the fictive, tapping into the unknown with compassion and genuine human emotion.
A uniquely cohesive collection of short examinations of aging, death, and living, these stories are subtly moving and thoroughly engaging.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63286-543-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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 modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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