Collins richly evokes a heartbreaking emotional terrain, setting it against the sparse, brutal landscape of the Australian...
The dead have tales to tell, if only we could hear them.
Debut novelist Collins bases her story on the legendary Australian outlaw Jessie Hickman. Born to a coldhearted mother and a loving father who died too soon, Jessie finds herself sold to a traveling circus at age 12. After her closest friend and fellow tightrope walker takes a terrible fall, she leaves the circus for a career in horse rustling, which lands her in prison; eventually, she's given a choice between languishing in jail or breaking horses for Fitz Henry. Of course, in 1917, a female convict is at the mercy of her employer, who is also her legal guardian, and Fitz quickly blackmails her into a brutal marriage. Pregnancy gives Jessie the courage to violently defy her husband, but the battle costs her the baby, as well. On the lam, she's pursued by men seeking rewards and legal retribution. Two of her pursuers—Jack Brown, Fitz’s former drover, and Barlow, the new police officer who’s already fighting some demons of his own—appear like Furies, seeking vindication, vengeance and something more. Curiously, the novel is narrated by Jessie’s dead child. This choice certainly emphasizes the land, which becomes a character in its own right, binding its inhabitants together in shared tribulations, challenging Jessie, Jack and Barlow at every turn. Too often, though, the narrative premise seems forced, unnecessarily drawing attention to the fantastic ability of the undead to know a past it never lived. Prefacing the tale with a brief account of one of Harry Houdini’s escapes also seems strained; Jessie’s horse may be named for the magician, but the allusion rather heavy-handedly foreshadows Jessie’s fate.
Collins richly evokes a heartbreaking emotional terrain, setting it against the sparse, brutal landscape of the Australian Outback.Pub Date: May 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-399-16709-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Amy Einhorn/Putnam
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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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