A masterful, highly readable rendering of the Greek classic.
A bloody tale of ancient war and grief comes to vibrant life in modern-day English.
While, in 2018, Wilson was the first woman to translate Homer’s Odyssey into English, her Iliad is the second by a woman in the past 10 years, following Caroline Alexander’s in 2015. The new work, like her well-received Odyssey, is a hefty package of more than 700 pages, with a highly informative introduction, maps, textual notes, genealogies, and a glossary. Wilson has again presented a Homer that sings, in sprightly iambic pentameter and pellucid language that avoids ponderosities like, well, ponderosities and pellucid. It’s repetitious, yes. The last phase of the Trojan War alternates between bickering and battles, starting with the fateful falling out of Achilles and Agamemnon that causes the former to withdraw to his tent for the next 400 pages. Thereafter, and often, the gods bicker and the military leaders bicker, and when they’re not fighting verbally, the stage is filled with sorties, routs, and one-on-ones, gorefests whose repetition is relieved by some variety in the slaughter, as eyeballs pop out or entrails pour out or heads come off, leaving torsos to tumble to the ground with a clatter of bronze armor. The shortness of Wilson’s lines—compared to Alexander’s or those in the popular translation by Richmond Lattimore—abetted by her unfussy diction and lyricism, are easy on the reader’s eye and seem to help the mind grasp the breadth of Homer’s canvas at any given moment while still marveling at details. Part of that bigger picture is a complex ambivalence about war, which can bestow or restore honor but also destroys friends, families, towns—the common bonds from which people and nations build empathy and tolerance. That message is clear in the closing scenes, as Achilles grieves for his lifelong companion, Patroclus, and Troy mourns Hector.
A masterful, highly readable rendering of the Greek classic.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2023
ISBN: 9781324001805
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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