A book that intends to balance on the fine wire of the exploitative-freak-show trope in order to render a point about...
Born into a family of circus acrobats, Olympia Knife is unique in more ways than one. As she struggles to control her tendency toward literal invisibility, she must also navigate her burgeoning love for the newest star of the circus: Diamond the Danger Eater.
Constantine’s (Sweet, 2016) second novel opens with the midact, midair disappearance of Alban and Julia, the Flying Knifes, as their young daughter watches from the trapeze platform. Olympia has been raised in the tightknit nucleus of the Stephens Great Attraction traveling circus, where her sporadic transparency blends in with the unique gifts of the fabulous Minnie the Fat Lady, Madame Barbue the Bearded Woman, Robin the Rubber Boy, and many others. As the book progresses, she is forced to confront the impermanence of even the closest of these relationships as, one by one, the members of her circus family begin to vanish into the ether. At the same time, Olympia finds herself falling in love with a mysterious newcomer—Diamond, who performs a dashing sword-swallowing act—and transforming her own identity into that of Nova the Half Man. As she struggles to navigate her unfamiliar emotions, her fluctuating visibility, and the unravelling of her livelihood when the circus grinds to a denuded halt, Olympia must thrust herself into the forefront of her life in order to preserve her own place within it. Though there is a tremendous amount happening in this novel, the similarity in the back stories of the characters, as well as a tendency to narrate even the most climactic of injuries, consummations, and murders in the same expository tone, renders the book hazy. The powerful central theme is similarly blurred by inconsistencies in the main characters' development (Olympia is both mousy and bold, Diamond both daring and prone to collapse in indecisive tears) and plot progression issues that find characters spending entire chapters rising from bed only to sink back into the same bed, exhausted, without much happening in between.
A book that intends to balance on the fine wire of the exploitative-freak-show trope in order to render a point about inclusion and identity but succeeds instead in crafting a series of more-or-less familiar freak-show character sketches.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-945053-27-6
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Interlude Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
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
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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