Colorful, exuberant, yet frustratingly directionless.
Can a 59-year-old widow in the Indian Himalayas find new love? Does she want to?
Set in the fictional town of Hamara Nagar, the second in Woodman’s (Jana Bibi’s Excellent Fortunes, 2012) series finds Jana as the town’s beloved fortuneteller, with the help of her adored and possibly psychic parrot, Mr. Ganguly. Jolly Grant House is home to a joyous, makeshift family: Jana; Mr. Ganguly; Mary, former children’s nurse and current resourceful housekeeper; Lal Bahadur Pun, a retired soldier; and Tilku, an orphaned Nepali boy who thinks he might be 11. Yet, a 1961 morning cracks with three misfortunes: First, Mr. Ganguly awakens the whole house with his screeching; second, Mr. Ganguly’s screeching alerts everyone to a burst water pipe; third, the reporter from the Illustrated Weekly of India is due at any minute. Determined to put her best foot forward, Jana endures a strange interview with the reporter, a Mr. Gopal, despite Mr. Ganguly’s constant warning of “Bad Bird!” Not until weeks later, when another reporter shows up for the same interview, does Jana begin to suspect that something fishy may be afoot. Perhaps she should have paid more attention to those poisoned pen letters claiming she stole Mr. Ganguly. The mystery, however, must take a back seat to the many other claims on Jana’s—and the reader’s—attention, including transcribing Grandfather MacPherson’s music, traveling by harrowing taxi cab to the dentist, interpreting dreams for Mr. Rambir’s newspaper and testing Mr. Abinath’s new elixir: Love Potion Number 10. Soon, love begins crackling through the air as besotted couples, intrigued pen pals and old flames cross Jana’s path. Crowded with charming characters, each with his or her own troubles, Woodman’s novel barely makes room for Jana’s mystery or love life.
Colorful, exuberant, yet frustratingly directionless.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9957-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2013
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
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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