A touching coming-of-age story, powerfully but gracefully infused with a spirit of place, which also pays tribute to a...
For a teenage boy living on the coast of England in 1914, change is everywhere. Freud’s (Lucky Break, 2011, etc.) evocative new novel intermingles the dawning consciousness of an imaginative, creative child, who meets a real artist, with the irreversible alteration brought to a small community by the start of World War I.
The Suffolk coastal landscape—its history, weather, natural fabric and ever shifting aspects—suffuses Freud’s delicately detailed chronicle of village life, in which sailing, fishing, shipwrecks and beachcombing are the stuff of local existence. Tom Maggs, 13 and born with a twisted foot, knows the terrain like the back of his hand and roams it freely. Tom has a taste for drawing, which is how he first encounters the dark figure of Mac, aka Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the noted Scottish architect and painter who, with his wife, also a renowned artist, is living locally, recuperating from illness after a career dive. Tom’s father, an alcoholic, terrorizes his family while the Mackintoshes’ loving companionship offers a different version of marriage. The couple also encourages Tom’s sketching, and he becomes their mail boy, delivering their letters to the post office, after steaming them open to read the contents. Once war begins, soldiers constantly come and go, the town and beaches are fortified against invasion, and Zeppelins fly overhead, dropping bombs. Tom and those around him are increasingly affected by the new laws, the distant fighting, and the national mood of fear and suspicion. When crises arrive, they propel the boy forward into an unimaginable future in which he will always cherish the love and artistic devotion he witnessed during that shattering year.
A touching coming-of-age story, powerfully but gracefully infused with a spirit of place, which also pays tribute to a revered artist.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62040-883-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
PROFILES
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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