Reading the journals of her Harvey Girl ancestor sends a young Texas woman back in time to the New Mexico frontier in Crook’s warmly drawn novel (Promised Lands, 1994, etc.).
Thirtyish Meg Mabry, an administrator in an Austin hospital, has a prickly relationship with her irrepressible grandmother, Claudia Bass. A renowned historian universally known as Bassie, the old lady made her reputation by publishing the journals of her mother, Hannah, a Harvey Girl at the Montezuma Hotel in New Mexico at the turn of the century. Bassie also essentially raised Meg after the girl’s alcoholic mother proved unreliable. She now insists that her granddaughter accomplish two things before Bassie dies: Meg must read the six volumes of her great-grandmother’s journals, and she must accompany her grandmother to Pecos, where Bassie was born and lived briefly before Hannah died of TB. To her ire, Bassie learns that the visitor’s center in Pecos, located near the site of the old Bass homestead, plans to excavate Dog Hill, where the bones of her mother’s pets are buried. With the help of mild-mannered archaeologist Jim Layton, Bassie and Meg dig up the dog bones in order to remove them. But what is a human skeleton doing buried there? While this mystery unfolds, Meg plows through great swaths of the journals, which make delightful reading as Hannah vividly describes her work at the hotel and friendships with other waitresses. But they have a darker side as well. Hannah’s husband, engineer Elliott Bass, bore lifelong emotional scars resulting from the murder of his family by Mormons during the infamous Mountain Meadows wagon-train massacre in Utah. During their marriage, Elliott traveled extensively, laying track for the fledgling railroad, sending home detailed letters (also included) while Hannah experienced a growing intellectual attraction to the son of a rich local sheep-rancher.
A multilayered narrative of impressive historical perspicacity, enriched by the author’s loving attention to character.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2006
ISBN: 0-670-03477-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION
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Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
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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. 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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PROFILES
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
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Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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