Lyrical, sad first novel about three teenagers growing up in a New Jersey town in the 1960s, with political events such as the assassination of President Kennedy and the Vietnam War in the background. Ziesk tells her story in the present tense, from the point of view of Joellen Stein, a sensitive girl who has recently lost her mother, feels estranged from her father, and whose entire outlook is colored by sorrow. Ida, a black woman who comes to cook for the family, becomes a kind of surrogate mother to her, but Joellen does not really escape the blues until she falls in love with young Joe Handy. Joellen is an introverted, self-indulgent character, and the reader may tire of her introspective musings, which are often banal. But Joe, a troubled young man with an absent father and a pitiful, alcoholic mother, is as richly imagined as a Dickens character. He learns to steal, to work, and to make love in the process of inventing himself, and Ziesk's scenes with Joe and Joellen sparkle. Too soon, though, Ziesk packs Joe off to Vietnam, where he's killed, and the reader is once again trapped in Joellen's consciousness. An innocent childhood friend of Joellen's, Charlieo, drifts into view, but Ziesk sends him to Vietnam as well, and brings him back coarsened and mutilated. He attempts to rape Joellen and then, oddly, just disappears. Meanwhile, Joellen graduates from high school and becomes a real estate agent, and a third man, a young police officer, enters her life, determinedly pursuing this grim young woman. In another hopeful development, Ida is pregnant. Ziesk invokes pathos beyond the point of believability: Her novel is so sad that it borders on the sentimental. An intense, clearly talented, but rather confused debut, flawed by an exasperating protagonist.
Pub Date: Jan. 20, 1997
ISBN: 0-87074-412-7
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Southern Methodist Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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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