Goldbloom explores complicated questions about community and individuality with humor, wit, and great sensitivity.
A Chasidic woman is surprised to find herself pregnant.
Surie Eckstein is a 57-year-old Chasidic woman with 10 children. Most of her children are married with children of their own. When Surie discovers that she’s pregnant—with twins, no less!—she’s shocked, of course, but also ashamed, anticipating the responses of her friends and neighbors. They’ll know she’s still having relations with her beloved husband, Yidel. “The women of the community would say mazal tov, but privately, they’d blush for her, the sex-crazed hussy.” So Surie doesn’t tell anyone. Goldbloom (You Lose These, 2011, etc.), who is herself Chasidic, writes with great depth of feeling about this close community but also with humor. Surie grows larger and larger, vaguely hoping that Yidel will figure out her secret without needing to be told. Instead, the secret of her pregnancy becomes twisted up with another painful secret: Surie and Yidel, it emerges, had a son named Lipa who died four years earlier and—to their shame—was gay. Unable to discuss Lipa with Yidel, Surie finds herself unable to discuss the pregnancy, either. In the meantime, time passes. Surie starts helping out at the clinic where she’s receiving prenatal care and, to her surprise, starts to feel a kind of fulfillment there. Goldbloom’s characterization of Surie, and of the whole cast, is wonderfully complex. She shows the joy of belonging to a community as well as the feelings of frustration at its strictures. How can a community bind itself together? How can one person ever truly know another?
Goldbloom explores complicated questions about community and individuality with humor, wit, and great sensitivity.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-17531-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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