Presents music as a glorious metaphor for an approach to life.
A music teacher’s failure with her gifted student is the starting point for this deeply felt meditation by adult and YA author Hall (The Noah Confessions, 2007, etc.) on the demands of musical passion and human love.
Pearl teaches violin at McCoy’s, a music store in West Los Angeles that carries offbeat instruments and caters to musicians. She is a lonely divorcée half in love with the store’s manager Franklin, a musical purist, and pursued by the much younger fellow teacher Clive, a bass player. The novel shifts between the present, in which Pearl faces her limitations and overcomes her misassumptions about the men in her life, with the recent past, in which she found, taught and lost Hallie, the most gifted student of her career. Unlike most of Pearl’s students, whose well-to-do parents push them to play, 14-year-old Hallie was an orphan of meager means. She received a grant to take lessons despite the disinterest of the aunt and uncle raising her. Hallie’s natural talent and quixotic moods quickly captivated Pearl. From the vantage point of the present, Pearl recognizes that she invested too much of herself in Hallie, in part because, like Hallie, Pearl had faced great family opposition to her musical ambitions as a child. While teaching Hallie, however, she convinced herself that her concern for the girl’s welfare was altruistic. When Hallie came to Pearl and claimed she was pregnant, Pearl called the authorities on the domineering uncle she suspected of abuse. Then Hallie turned on Pearl, denying any problems at home and accusing Pearl of obsession and improprieties. No charges were filed on either side, but all contact—including lessons—ceased. Sorting out her mistakes with Hallie, Pearl re-examines her own relationship to music. Hall’s passion for music shines through—her rumination on the violinist’s wrist is particularly lovely—and because she never cuts emotional corners, there is nothing self-indulgent or sentimental about Pearl’s hard-won if makeshift happiness with down-to-earth Clive.
Presents music as a glorious metaphor for an approach to life.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-56512-463-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
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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