From the maternal self-doubt to the spoiled supporting characters, everything feels mass-manufactured.
Bored North London housewife uses flirtation and alcohol to liven things up, in U.K. journalist Neill’s debut.
Lucy Sweeney is in a rut. Staying home to care for her three young boys has all but sucked the life out of the once-creative television producer. To keep things interesting, Lucy maintains a constant level of chaos in her home. School projects are slapped together at the last moment, laundry piles up for months and pet hamsters run wild. In addition to horrid housekeeping skills, Lucy also maintains £10,000 of credit card debt and has a tenuous relationship with her oft-traveling husband. Rather than set her life in order, Lucy gets overly involved in school politics to battle the monotony of school runs and soiled nappies. Playground politics offer Lucy plenty of opportunity to land herself in more trouble. She harbors two crushes: one on a man referred to as “Sexy Domesticated Dad” and the other on the impeccably dressed and impossibly slim mother of four (aka Yummy Mummy No. 1). The girl-crush is relatively harmless; Lucy is jealous of Yummy Mummy’s ability to be prompt and properly accessorized at all times. As far as the Sexy Domesticated Dad, her interest is potentially hazardous and purely sexual. SDD reciprocates her feelings, and an affair becomes a very real possibility. Things in Lucy’s world are ready to implode as she endures a classic midlife crisis. In an effort to maintain her sanity and connection to the “real” world, Lucy sneaks off for drinks with her single girlfriends. But her single pals only serve to further complicate Lucy’s messy affairs. She can’t resist meddling in the love lives of others. Neill is a sound writer adroitly producing spot-on dialog and a few hilarious moments of Mummy-mayhem. But while she attempts fresh twists, readers will eventually suffer from disappointment by the too-familiar plot.
From the maternal self-doubt to the spoiled supporting characters, everything feels mass-manufactured.Pub Date: July 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59448-944-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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 masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.
An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).
Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.Pub Date: April 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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