London-based Vakil manages extraordinary things in this debut as he conveys the sights, smells, and especially the tastes of his native Bombay through the voracious appetites of a movie-mad, sex-crazed, ever-hungry young boy. Setting forth from his family’s glass house by the sea, eight-year-old Cyrus Readymoney enjoys more freedom of movement than most boys his age. He shows up at his neighbors’ houses during mealtimes (sometimes visiting them all in a single day); he hops a bus into Bombay to see whatever movie he wants; he even invites himself along on other families— vacations. His high-spiritedness gets him into trouble with his teachers, of course, and the fact that nothing is denied him means he’s older than his years in some ways. Then, too, he’s something of an insomniac. Still, to some these qualities are endearing—especially to the Maharani living with her adopted daughters in the crumbling mansion next door. She takes him under her wing at a time when Cyrus is already lusting for her daughter Meera, giving him the close contact he had only dreamed about previously. And he’s traveling with other neighbors to their home in southern India for six weeks, so life looks good. But then his father, a busy man not above having an occasional affair, goes off the deep end when he catches Cyrus’s mother with another man; she leaves, taking the children with her. Comfortably settled in a city apartment, Cyrus still tries to keep his ties to his old neighborhood, even going as planned on the vacation. When his father has a heart attack, though, he must move back home, only to find his parents gone to America, seeking treatment, and his former comfort vanished forever. A sensual feast and a glutton’s delight, this is also a moving, beautifully nuanced tale of a precocious boy and a childhood’s premature end. (Book-of-the-Month Club/Quality Paperback Book Club alternate selection)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-85299-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1998
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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