Humphreys deserves more recognition for the emotional intensity and evocative lyricism of her seemingly straightforward...
Humphreys (Nocturne, 2013, etc.) offers a heartbreaking yet redemptive story about loss and survival surrounding a British prisoner of war during World War II and the wife he barely got to know before his capture.
After James’ plane is shot down on his first mission as an RAF pilot in 1940, the former grammar school science teacher spends the rest of the war in POW camps, where he watches fellow prisoners fail, often fatally, in their attempts at escape. Deciding he prefers simple survival, he eschews such attempts and concentrates on keeping a journal on local birds. He also develops a complicated relationship with the prison’s kommandant, a classics professor who studied at Oxford and serves grudgingly in the military; he recognizes a kindred spirit in James and allows his nature study. In her nuanced description of the kommandant’s attempts at kindness and James’ responses both during and after the war, Humphries uncovers the human dimension in wartime brutality. Meanwhile, deeply in love with his new wife, Rose, James purposely writes her letters focused on bird lore instead of his own condition because “he doesn’t want his words home to degenerate into a litany of complaint.” In a sad irony, Rose misunderstands his intent—not unlike the way James misinterprets the kommandant’s intent in taking him to see a rare cedar waxwing—and assumes he doesn’t feel strongly about her. Desperately lonely, she becomes involved with a soldier stationed nearby, discovering with her lover the passionate emotion James feels but cannot express. Cut to 1950 as James and Rose face the war’s aftermath with varying measures of guilt, bitterness and resilience, not to mention what ifs. As Rose realizes, “[i]t’s so hard to get life right....All the small balances are impossible to strike most of the time.”
Humphreys deserves more recognition for the emotional intensity and evocative lyricism of her seemingly straightforward prose and for her ability to quietly squirrel her way into the reader’s heart.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-544-34869-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
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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