Vivid style and strong characters add credibility to an equally melodramatic follow-up.
Sugar Lacey’s melodrama continues in a sequel to the bestselling McFadden’s debut novel (Sugar, 2000).
Born out of wedlock and raised by Sara and May, two sisters who run a brothel in small-town Arkansas, Sugar returns one freezing winter night nearly dead, her belly sliced open. The stalwart sisters stitch her up without asking too many questions, but Sara, troubled by conscience, finally reveals what she knows about Sugar’s parents. Bertie Mae Brown was a shy young woman in love with Joe Taylor, an itinerant railroad worker. Their love triggered inexplicable jealousy in Shonuff Clayton, a handsome, dangerously unstable man who also happened to be Sara’s lover. What Sara doesn’t reveal: She was the one who collected a few strands of Bertie’s beautiful hair and Joe’s sweaty handkerchief for Shonuff, who then paid an obeah woman to put a curse on Bertie and Joe and all their descendants. Bertie gave birth to Sugar after Joe moved away and married Pearl Taylor. But Joe couldn’t escape the curse: his daughter Jude was murdered. Only Sugar knew who did it—and she kept her mouth shut. Although Sara and May die of natural causes during her stay with them, Sugar is nonetheless suspected of causing their deaths and decamps once more. Ten years later, in St. Louis, she finds her old friend Mary Bedford emaciated and near death, her decrepit house turned into a shooting gallery for neighborhood junkies. She ties up Mary’s addicted granddaughter Mercy in the garret of the New Hope African Methodist Church and bottle-feeds her with broth until the girl is over the worst of heroin withdrawal. They can’t stay at the church forever, however, so Sugar and Mercy return to Bigelow, hoping for help from their kinfolk. Here, the somewhat incoherent plot quickly ends: the man who murdered Jude Taylor and attacked Sara is back in town—and more than one person wants him dead.
Vivid style and strong characters add credibility to an equally melodramatic follow-up.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-525-94636-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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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