A story of a historical tragedy with well-developed characters but uneven execution.
In this historical novel, a woman fights against social conventions to win the man she loves, but the Galveston hurricane of 1900 sets her on a new path.
The book begins with its teenage narrator discovering her grandmother Clara’s memoir, written in 1964, just before Clara faced the effects of Alzheimer’s disease. The bulk of the novel is made up of this memoir, set in 1900, with occasional interjections by the unnamed granddaughter. Clara recounts her life as a 17-year-old in a wealthy family in the island city of Galveston, Texas, communing with her sister, Lydia, and fighting her mother’s demands for her presence at high teas and galas. Although Clara’s mother aspires for both daughters to marry well, the teenager’s heart is set on Grant Hambry, a young clerk working in the shipping industry. Grant’s heart is true and he wins over Clara’s father; his proposal is accepted and everything seems to be on track. All of them are, of course, unaware they’re about to face the deadliest natural disaster in United States history: a hurricane that will wash away the city and claim several thousand lives. In the last section of the novel, Clara struggles for survival, watches loved ones drown in devastating waves, and deals with the aftermath of loss. Walner effectively paints Clara as a sympathetic figure and portrays the teenager reading her diary with a sense of realism. However, attempts at historical accuracy are uneven—for example, it would have been scandalous for a young woman of Clara’s age and class to be seen meeting a man alone without a chaperone—and the dialogue alternates between stiltedness (“Did we not receive a report from Washington D.C. yesterday?”) and colloquialism, which makes the overall narrative feel unconvincing. Some characters, such as climatologist Isaac Cline, pop up suddenly, then drop out of view without meaningfully intersecting with Clara’s story. This, along with repetitive exposition, adversely affects the overall flow of the work.
A story of a historical tragedy with well-developed characters but uneven execution.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-08-803259-6
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Silver Dawn Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
For devoted Hannah fans in search of a good cry.
The miseries of the Depression and Dust Bowl years shape the destiny of a Texas family.
“Hope is a coin I carry: an American penny, given to me by a man I came to love. There were times in my journey when I felt as if that penny and the hope it represented were the only things that kept me going.” We meet Elsa Wolcott in Dalhart, Texas, in 1921, on the eve of her 25th birthday, and wind up with her in California in 1936 in a saga of almost unrelieved woe. Despised by her shallow parents and sisters for being sickly and unattractive—“too tall, too thin, too pale, too unsure of herself”—Elsa escapes their cruelty when a single night of abandon leads to pregnancy and forced marriage to the son of Italian immigrant farmers. Though she finds some joy working the land, tending the animals, and learning her way around Mama Rose's kitchen, her marriage is never happy, the pleasures of early motherhood are brief, and soon the disastrous droughts of the 1930s drive all the farmers of the area to despair and starvation. Elsa's search for a better life for her children takes them out west to California, where things turn out to be even worse. While she never overcomes her low self-esteem about her looks, Elsa displays an iron core of character and courage as she faces dust storms, floods, hunger riots, homelessness, poverty, the misery of migrant labor, bigotry, union busting, violent goons, and more. The pedantic aims of the novel are hard to ignore as Hannah embodies her history lesson in what feels like a series of sepia-toned postcards depicting melodramatic scenes and clichéd emotions.
For devoted Hannah fans in search of a good cry.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-2501-7860-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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