Second-novelist Webster (Sins of the Mothers, 1993) paints an appealing, if not wholly compelling, portrait of the sexual mores, intellectual habits, and bohemian aspirations of an upper-class Jewish family in 1929 New York. With the death of patriarch Eugene, Agnes and her grown children Lara and Johnnie lease the big house to David and his pregnant wife Muriel, two early converts to psychoanalysis who hope to turn the house and expansive grounds into a mental health center for disturbed children. While David and Muriel first focus their efforts on Robin, a young girl hesitating on the brink of autism, their attention gravitates also to Agnes” troubled family, now quartered in the big house’s adjacent cottage. Agnes has begun a slightly sadomasochistic affair with the much younger Walter, a German baron with eyes for American wealth, while Lara, a struggling painter, holds a modern woman’s views and conducts a random love life to prove it, though a childhood affair with her brother has tainted her perception of everything. Then there’s Johnnie, a brilliant engineer who escapes from the world by designing and flying kites on the farm—and who’s deemed crazy because of his obsession with the political instability of Germany. Though his distress at the world’s growing anti-Semitism is well founded, his self-obsessed mother and flapper sister think that his recitations of Mein Kampf do little more than suggest his inability to get along with all concerned. Amid the family’s turbulence, Webster evokes the times these characters live in—the lure of Harlem nightclubs and Florida land speculation, the excitement of the new “talking cure,” and the burgeoning influence of cubism. The story hardly lacks for drama, but an odd emotional restraint seems even so to cauterize the characters in midstep. Engaging, though a certain essential vivacity is missing.
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-7914-4099-0
Page Count: 250
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
Categories: GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
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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. 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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PROFILES
Debut novel by hip-hop rap artist Sister Souljah, whose No Disrespect (1994), which mixes sexual history with political diatribe, is popular in schools country-wide. In its way, this is a tour de force of black English and underworld slang, as finely tuned to its heroine’s voice as Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. The subject matter, though, has a certain flashiness, like a black Godfather family saga, and the heroine’s eventual fall develops only glancingly from her character. Born to a 14-year-old mother during one of New York’s worst snowstorms, Winter Santiaga is the teenaged daughter of Ricky Santiaga, Brooklyn’s top drug dealer, who lives like an Arab prince and treats his wife and four daughters like a queen and her princesses. Winter lost her virginity at 12 and now focuses unwaveringly on varieties of adolescent self-indulgence: sex and sugar-daddies, clothes, and getting her own way. She uses school only as a stepping-stone for getting out of the house—after all, nobody’s paying her to go there. But if there’s no money in it, why go? Meanwhile, Daddy decides it’s time to move out of Brooklyn to truly fancy digs on Long Island, though this places him in the discomfiting position of not being absolutely hands-on with his dealers; and sure enough the rise of some young Turks leads to his arrest. Then he does something really stupid: he murders his wife’s two weak brothers in jail with him on Riker’s Island and gets two consecutive life sentences. Winter’s then on her own, especially with Bullet, who may have replaced her dad as top hood, though when she selfishly fails to help her pregnant buddy Simone, there’s worse—much worse—to come. Thinness aside: riveting stuff, with language so frank it curls your hair. (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-671-02578-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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