A fleeting portrait of a critical moment in a young woman’s life, one with which the late John Hughes might have felt some...
A young Japanese woman is left hurt, confused, and lost in the wake of her father’s mysterious death.
Prolific novelist Yoshimoto (The Lake, 2011, etc.) offers another story of youth, grief, and redemption in this ephemeral yet lovely portrait of an unformed woman. The narrator here is Yocchan, who's fled her childhood home for the hip urban district of Shimokitazawa in central Tokyo to seek work and independence. A year ago, her musician father, Imo, was found dead in a murder-suicide with a mysterious woman in a forest. The story, like many of Yoshimoto’s arcs, is one in which there’s little real drama, yet a pressing emotional alchemy emerges that leaves everyone changed at the end. Yocchan struggles but doesn't give up, pressing ahead with her new job at a French bistro and flirting with a handsome admirer, Shintani-kun. Her mother, haunted by her husband’s ghost, moves in with her daughter in her small apartment and struggles to remake her own life. “We each had to live our own battles,” Yocchan confesses. “We could hardly give up and die; and if we had to live, we’d have to rely on what we were made of.” Along the way, there are delicate and vivid descriptions of food, work, loneliness, and human connection, too, painted with subtle yet heartfelt language. Yocchan enters a relationship with Shintani-kun yet finds herself drawn to Yamazaki-san, an older man who was a band mate of her father's. The book culminates in a ceremony to free her father’s spirit and a tipping point that leaves Yocchan on the verge of leaving for Paris and, as all young people do, standing on the precipice of becoming her adult self.
A fleeting portrait of a critical moment in a young woman’s life, one with which the late John Hughes might have felt some kinship.Pub Date: Dec. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61902-786-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
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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