Long’s simple technique of moving back and forth in time creates a vivid and emotionally honest work of art. A rare debut,...
Striking just the right balance between lush language and graceful storytelling, this impressive first novel depicts a young woman seeking to escape the scars of her past.
Jennie has been running from her painful history for as long as she can remember. The struggle has made her bitter and cruel, a stone-hard woman who begins her story by leaving her kind husband and kidnapping her only friend. But as narrator of her own ugly-duckling tale, she knows she must back up to the beginning, to the time when there was no Jennie, only Juniper Tree Burning. Raised in a crumbling adobe hovel in rural New Mexico without a toilet or running water, Juniper is the child of Ray and Faith, back-to-nature hippies who join the cult-like Meeting Way and use Juniper and her younger brother, Sunny Boy Blue, as adversarial proxies in their own troubled marriage. The flashbacks evocatively portray childhood suffering, showing Juniper living in poverty, ostracized at school, and rejected by her own mother, who feels they are not astrologically compatible. Her only solace is found in her mother’s photo album, which holds idyllic images of her dead grandparents in Seattle and serves as fodder for the complex fairy tale of salvation she builds for herself and Sunny Boy Blue. As a teenager, Juniper finds a fairy godmother (a bored, wealthy older woman who enjoys the role of Pygmalion), is transformed into Jennie, and eventually goes to medical school. But the past catches up to her when Sunny Boy Blue, whom she has shunned as an adult, commits suicide in Seattle. She buys a truck and hijacks her friend, her destination Seattle and redemption, although both are harder to get to than she imagined.
Long’s simple technique of moving back and forth in time creates a vivid and emotionally honest work of art. A rare debut, written with confidence and expertise.Pub Date: June 6, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-0203-1
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
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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