Absent the dramatic character arcs or plot twists readers would expect from an American novel, this urban fairy tale...
Dubliner Vivian Lawlor doesn’t fit in anywhere. Will she ever find her place in this world?
Debut novelist Lally creates a portrait of loneliness through the whimsical and obsessive Viv, who meticulously and painstakingly plots her daily walks through the streets of Dublin. The Irishwoman lives in the cluttered home she inherited from her deceased great-aunt, with whom she had lived since her parents’ deaths. Auntie was a Grey Gardens–style hoarder with an impressive collection of oddball items. Quirkiness runs in the Lawlor family, and before their deaths, Viv’s parents managed to convince this daughter (they have another, also named Vivian) that she's a changeling from another world. Viv is now a woman searching for portals to the world where she belongs and desperately seeking a friend. Her interactions with the people she crosses paths with in her daily life—shopkeepers, taxi drivers, urban pedestrians—are so, so awkward, they are at once delightfully hilarious and painfully cringeworthy. But they will never lead to friendship, and so Viv posts a sign advertising for a pal. Not just any friend. This charmingly touched heroine is on the hunt for a friend named Penelope (no Pennies need apply). Viv, who insists on the abbreviated version of her name because she loves palindromes, wants to ask this new friend why Penelope does not rhyme with antelope. When Viv meets her Penelope, she’s met her match. Though not a grounding influence, Penelope’s friendship forces Viv to see her world from a new perspective.
Absent the dramatic character arcs or plot twists readers would expect from an American novel, this urban fairy tale delivers something that is both subtle and profound in its examination of the human soul. Magically delicious.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61219-597-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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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