A colorful story of relationships and how they change their participants’ perspectives on love.
A renowned psychotherapist helps people find paths back to love and begins to search for his own fulfillment in this debut novel.
Strauss allows the nuances and idiosyncrasies of a couple’s new relationship to unfold as they unknowingly confide in the same psychotherapist. Dr. Harry Salinger, who touts himself as a guru on relationships, espouses advice that he realizes he might do well to take himself. As he witnesses Jennifer’s and Jacques’ differing perspectives on their relationship, he starts to recognize the void in his own love life and the fact that he’s shut himself off from the possibility of spontaneous love. As he meets with Jennifer and Jacques individually, all three slowly transform into more open, trusting people. But as the relationship ebbs and flows, new conflicts emerge and trust begins to break down. When Jacques and Jennifer discover that they’ve both been seeing the same therapist—and that Salinger didn’t bother to disclose this—the book takes a sharp turn. Each character has to learn what it means to endure a relationship once the honeymoon phase is over and real feelings are at stake. Strauss delivers a fine book about parallel relationships that’s never tedious, thanks in part to sharp dialogue; at one point, for example, Jennifer describes having sex with Jacques as “making love to a hurricane.” With sharp dialogue and descriptive, hilarious dating and sex scenes, Strauss shows the world of Jennifer and Jacques as one of uncertainty, amusement, confusion and fun. The book crescendos with each character facing a choice to either stay open and take risks or to deny true love.
A colorful story of relationships and how they change their participants’ perspectives on love.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-1491709801
Page Count: 260
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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