An engaging story of overcoming terrible circumstances with temerity and grace.
In this debut novel, a battered wife in 1950s rural Georgia, aided by an unlikely group of loving souls, finds hidden reserves of strength and self-worth.
The spirit of Cieli Mae, Vidalia Jackson’s stillborn daughter, is the narrator of this tale; Vidalia’s husband, JB Jackson, caused her death by “pummeling” her mother. Vidalia never knows when JB will be home, but she knows that when he does arrive, she’s in for more beatings. JB uses his boyish good looks to get away with his crimes, which also include statutory rape. Vidalia keeps the existence of Cieli Mae a secret, and as the spirit grows, she becomes a witness to her mother’s inner and outer struggles. Despite many beatings, Vidalia manages to give birth to two healthy sets of twins, and she and Cieli Mae look after them with fierce loyalty. Whenever they’re threatened, Vidalia’s strength comes to the fore. She also finds support from the most unlikely places, including JB’s mother, who spends most of her time making excuses for her son but also helps her daughter-in-law regain her strength; Doc Feldman, who offers far more aid and support than required and has a secret of his own; and Ruby Pearl Banks, whose husband was murdered and lynched by local Ku Klux Klan members. Mantella draws each of these characters well, and there’s never a lack of action in the narrative. Some of the book’s colloquialisms (“At forty-some years of age, the doc turned up on the skinny side of just handsome enough”) may throw readers at the start, but they’ll grow to like them as the story goes on. Overall, this work, set in the Deep South in the 1950s and ’60s when battered wives had few rights and little recourse, shows readers how personal growth happens slowly and how strength builds when one has the help of one’s community.
An engaging story of overcoming terrible circumstances with temerity and grace.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63026-962-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Turner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2015
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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