The incantatory style is a bit over the top, but, still, Sapphire’s Grave is a lyric paean to black women through the...
A Detroit attorney’s first novel, the tale of an African slave and her many descendants.
Sierra Leone, 1749: Nameless and feared by all on board, a lissome slave with blue-black skin and cicatriced face is brought to the captain for his sexual pleasure—and nearly tears his throat out. Later, in Charleston, her daughter, named Sapphire, grows to womanhood knowing only that her mother died in a fire. She too becomes a slave, proud to a fault though under a cruel owner whose severe punishments are intended to set an example for others on his plantation. Sapphire is the mother of three when she and a newborn meet death at this master’s hands, but her three daughters live on. In the 1870s, their descendant, Sister, begins to channel the spirit of Sapphire, reliving her life as she falls into one fit after another. Sarah, an old midwife and healer understands that Sister is possessed and not crazy, but the patient is past healing. Her good-for-nothing husband, Prince, keeps another woman on the side, Queen Marie, an independent sort who hopes that Prince will leave Sister once and for all but doesn’t want his child or any other traditional traps. Prince is careful, but his young son, Prince Junior, isn’t—and the boy ere long loses his virginity to his father’s paramour, leaving Queen Marie unexpectedly pregnant, though by father or son she doesn’t know. She gives birth to Vyda Rose, who becomes a successful prostitute with her own brothel. More of Sapphire’s descendants appear and disappear on a crowded stage—until the birth of Clovey in 1932. Much loved and unusually intelligent, Clovey has rare insight into the lives of her ancestresses. Her precocious art of seeing is often inspired by her great-grandma Sister, whose otherworldly mien both fascinates and frightens Clovey. When Sister finally dies, Clovey re-creates these generations of unsung women in paintings that receive acclaim for their visionary power.
The incantatory style is a bit over the top, but, still, Sapphire’s Grave is a lyric paean to black women through the centuries.Pub Date: Dec. 24, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-50323-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
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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