As fiction, utterly devastating; as psychology, grim and apocalyptic: a ripped-bare portrait of the evil that children can...
A band of young girls embarks on a Lord of the Flies–esque trip to the country.
With aplomb, Bathurst makes the leap from an unusually absorbing nonfiction debut—The Lighthouse Stevensons (1999), about the family that built most of the lighthouses on Scotland’s craggy shores—to this harrowing first novel about the hell of early teenage life. Several 14-year-old London schoolgirls are being sent via bus to an old manor in the countryside for a few weeks of mostly pointless exercises and activities under the watchful eye of two of the school’s more hated teachers. Not that the girls need anyone else to hate: there’s enough jealousy, competitiveness, and sheer evil encompassed in their daily interactions to fill the schedules of numerous full-time therapists. Hen, who seems the closest thing to a protagonist, hasn’t been her usual spunky self since she moved down from Scotland, and she’s on the verge of wasting away from anorexia. Her “friend” Jules is roiling with bitterness toward Hen (and toward just about everyone else) and loses no opportunity to show her up in front of the others. Ruling the roost is Caz, the preternaturally tanned, toned, well-developed and well-poised one who is roundly hated by every other girl on the trip, though you wouldn’t know it by the way the girls flop over themselves in a desperate, clawing battle to be her favored sycophant. When the girls aren’t busy tearing each other apart with biting comments and never-ending one-upmanship, they sneak into the small nearby town to wander around unsupervised and carouse with a group of loser guys who see easy prey. Nothing good comes out of any of it, of course, and there’s little hope, generally, to be found in these bleak and fiercely detailed pages.
As fiction, utterly devastating; as psychology, grim and apocalyptic: a ripped-bare portrait of the evil that children can do.Pub Date: May 9, 2003
ISBN: 0-618-26327-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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