Well wrought and admirably tough-minded, though readers charmed by Jen’s earlier, easier work (Mona in the Promised Land,...
Psychologically and politically astute tale of American multicultural family life.
When Lan Lin arrives from China in 1999 to work as a nanny for her distant cousin Carnegie Wong, Carnegie and his wife Blondie have two adopted Asian-American daughters, Lizzy and Wendy, and a 13-month-old biological son, Bailey. Fifteen years earlier, Janie Bailey fell in love with Carnegie when he decided to adopt abandoned baby Lizzy; when they married, implacable Mama Wong saddled Janie with the pejorative nickname Blondie to indicate her disapproval of her son’s marrying a white woman. The couple adopted Wendy from China six years later, and, by the time Lan arrives, the Wongs seem happy if stressed-out, with both parents working, unreliable part-time help, and Lizzy’s teenage surliness exacerbated by the minor but real tensions of a multiracial family. The recently deceased Mama Wong arranged in her will for Lan to care for their children, though Blondie suspects her real motive was to provide Carnegie with “the wife you should have married.” As things circle through time via first-person commentary from Lan and all the Wongs (except Bailey), we see the nanny skillfully manipulating the girls and Carnegie to alienate them from Blondie. It’s not clear if this is deliberate, or if Lan’s fatalistic, distinctly Chinese personality simply throws into unflattering relief Blondie’s slightly facile warmth as the product of a privileged white family her husband and daughters feel they can’t completely join. Jen’s eye for the complexities of American life is shrewd, her characters utterly believable as a series of catastrophic events prompt the family’s breakup—with a tentative reconciliation at the hospital where Carnegie is undergoing heart surgery. But the knowledge that “this world can disappear like any other” can’t be lightly dismissed in a novel so surprisingly dark despite some wonderful humor.
Well wrought and admirably tough-minded, though readers charmed by Jen’s earlier, easier work (Mona in the Promised Land, 1996, etc.) may find this one more of a challenge.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-4213-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
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 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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