Ruth laments, “I done lost most them I loved, and most my beloveds die ugly,” but this is the tale of Mammy, not Ruth.
Authorized by the Margaret Mitchell estate, this historical novel takes up the story of Mammy, one of the most beloved minor characters in Gone With the Wind.
McCaig’s (Canaan, 2007, etc.) latest serves as a prequel not only to Mitchell’s classic, but also to his own Rhett Butler’s People (2007). Ruth’s story actually begins with her first mistress’ story. Parisian heiress Solange Escarlette marries Augustin Fornier, the owner of a Caribbean sugar plantation. She soon discovers that her husband is rather ineffectual and that a slave revolt has reduced the prospects of the Sucarie du Jardin. Solange reveals herself to be both unsentimental and savvy. She saves the family’s fortunes; repositions them in Savannah, Georgia; and, rather incidentally, takes a young slave girl into her household. Indeed, Solange is a vivid, vivacious woman whose tale is bewitching, but, alas, we must leave her to see through Ruth’s eyes soon enough. Ruth’s imagined life should be fascinating—rescued from certain death on Saint-Domingue, plunged into the American slave system, and finally positioned as Miss Scarlett’s Mammy—yet McCaig instead simply uses Ruth as a lens through which to view a dramatic swath of history. Events both cataclysmic and quotidian swirl around Ruth—everything from the Haitian revolution and John Brown’s Rebellion to Miss Scarlett's first menstrual period. Yet Ruth’s own manifold troubles pass quickly, presumably to afford more time to her witnessing of events in drawing rooms and dueling fields. Gifted with second sight, Ruth sees mists around people not long for this earthly realm, but more often than not, her talent foreshadows the passings of masters, mistresses and their children.
Ruth laments, “I done lost most them I loved, and most my beloveds die ugly,” but this is the tale of Mammy, not Ruth.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4353-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 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 deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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