A slight sophomore slump after a pitch-perfect debut, but commendably ambitious and ultimately rewarding.
Expanding her canvas from The Dive from Clausen’s Pier (2001, etc.), Packer explores a friendship and a family wounded by a teenager’s attempted suicide.
While she confined herself to the first-person narrator’s point of view in her bestselling first novel, here the author persuasively enters the heads of five different people in northern California: Liz and Sarabeth, best friends since the suicide of Sarabeth’s mother 30 years ago; Liz’s husband, Brody, a business-development executive; their severely depressed 15-year-old, Lauren; and her carefully well-adjusted younger brother, Joe. Sarabeth is unmarried, a designer who gussies up for-sale houses and apartments with custom-made lampshades or pillows. She’s the “creative” one, Liz the contented housewife who doesn’t mind hand-holding her turbulent friend. But when Lauren slashes her wrists and Sarabeth doesn’t call for days after finding out, Liz feels betrayed. Things are also rocky with Brody when Lauren comes home from the hospital; the different approaches the spouses take with their still-raw daughter drive them apart. At first, it’s hard to sympathize with Packer’s privileged, self-absorbed characters. Lauren seems to be wallowing in her distress; Sarabeth and Liz nurse their grievances instead of talking honestly about them; Brody flings himself into e-mail and business trips; Joe vanishes to soccer games and sleepovers. There isn’t a lot of action to grab readers’ attention. Slowly and carefully, Packer shows her characters putting their lives back together after a traumatizing blow. Lauren slowly regains her self-esteem and sense of humor; Brody and Liz reaffirm a deep, satisfying marital love; Sarabeth battles depression and makes new friends, understanding that she can’t always lean on Liz. The two old friends’ moving reconciliation closes a quiet narrative whose emotions, we come to realize, run deep and true.
A slight sophomore slump after a pitch-perfect debut, but commendably ambitious and ultimately rewarding.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-375-41281-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
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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