Slow-moving, long and meandering, like an Amazonian stream—with moments of beauty, but in need of a machete.
Two sisters work both banks of the river and both sides of the law, united in their knowledge of stitchery, in this ponderous semi-epic, set in the steamy Brazilian jungle in the 1920s and ’30s.
This debut novel from Peebles, a native of Brazil, concerns Emília and Luzia dos Santos, virtuous sisters living in poverty on one of the vast, near-feudal estates of the swampy interior. Emília is sentimental and gushy, given to praying to Saint Anthony to one day send her a prince—and soon, for as the book opens she is “nineteen and already an old maid.” Sister Luzia, meanwhile, has taken a nasty spill from a tall tree and been awarded cruel nicknames by the other kids for her troubles. Well, nothing will set a future revolutionary off like getting dissed by the local yokels, and so it goes: Luzia hooks up with the local peasant bandits-cum-revolutionaries, led by one Hawk, who “had become a cangaceiro when he killed the famous Colonel Bartolomeu of Serra Negra in his own study, bypassing the colonel’s capangas and gutting him with his own letter opener.” Bad way to go, that. Luzia, for her part, becomes a sure hand with most forms of contemporary weaponry, slaying one running dog of reaction after another (“The first cut’s always the hardest. After that, it gets easier”) while keeping her pinking shears within reach. And Emília—well, she’s gone off and married the son of a big landowner, since to do otherwise would have thrown the whole twin-track story off balance. Neither sister feels complete without the other, and neither has the true love she deserves—or does she? Emília’s a peach, but unappreciated; for all her deformities, Luzia has a certain Sonia Braga quality to her, but the Hawk is just plain paranoid, the hubby a drip and the jungle just too murky, which means only one thing: Darling, we love you, but give us Park Avenue or a pine box. Peebles’s novel is one of two about seamstresses being published in August (see the review of The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard by Erin McGraw, also in this issue).
Slow-moving, long and meandering, like an Amazonian stream—with moments of beauty, but in need of a machete.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-073887-7
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
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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