In creating a white Lady Bountiful and a wise but unworldly black servant, South African Mutch has more in common with The...
South Africa before, during and after apartheid, portrayed through the eyes of a black woman and, to a lesser extent, the white woman who becomes her benefactor as well as her employer.
In 1919, Cathleen Harrington leaves Ireland and starts a new life in South Africa with her fiance, Edward, who has already settled at Cradock House in the town of Cradock in the semi-desert area called the Karoo. In 1930, Cathleen’s unmarried black South African maid, Miriam, who has become Cathleen’s close if unequal friend, gives birth to a daughter she names Ada after Cathleen’s sister back in Ireland. While devoted to her own children, sweet-natured Phil and hardhearted Rosemary, Cathleen takes Ada under her wing, teaching her to read and play the piano. Ada, a gifted musician, is in turn devoted to Cathleen, who regularly leaves her intimate diary open with the tacit understanding that Ada will read it. While Rosemary treats Ada with cold propriety (perhaps understandable given Cathleen’s clear preference for Ada over her own daughter), sensitive Phil seems remarkable, even naïvely colorblind in his affection for Ada. By the time he hugs her goodbye before leaving to fight in World War II, his friendship has romantic overtones, although it remains pure. It is adolescent Ada who nurses him when he returns. Unfortunately, Phil never comes to life as an actual character before his early death, so the unconsummated romance feels more perfunctory than tragic. More believable is Cathleen’s passionless marriage to Edward. After Edward behaves abhorrently toward Ada, she runs away in shame. But she eventually returns, remaining as committed to Cathleen and Cradock House as she is to her friends, family and comrades in the black township as they suffer increasingly harsh laws before rising in victorious defiance.
In creating a white Lady Bountiful and a wise but unworldly black servant, South African Mutch has more in common with The Help’s Kathryn Stockett than Doris Lessing or Nadine Gordimer.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-01630-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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