Skillfully rendered from Ginny's point of view, McHenry's debut novel is a touching tale about loss and grief, love and...
Ginny Selvaggio believes that "normal" means nothing, and everything. And she keeps a Normal Book to prove it.
Twenty-something Ginny has Asperger's syndrome, a type of autism sometimes presenting itself as a quirky, difficult personality. Ginny doesn't like crowds, doesn't like to be touched and rarely looks anyone in the eye. And she sometimes hides in a closet when stressed. Now Ginny's protective parents are dead, succumbing to accidental carbon monoxide poisoning while on vacation. Readers meet Ginny the day of the funeral and follow her as she retreats from the crowd to seek comfort in one activity that brings order into her life: cooking. She chooses her Nonna's recipe for bread soup, ribollita, and as the fragrance of soup begins to waft through the kitchen, Nonna's apparition appears, and the ghost tells Ginny "Do no let her." Ginny feels compelled to discover the meaning of her grandmother's admonition, and that quest soon finds Ginny eager to conjure up other ghosts to define and explain her life. To do so, she cooks every hand-written recipe she can find on her bookshelf. McHenry weaves in conflicts with Ginny's younger sister, Amanda, who feels obligated to take over her parents’ responsibilities. There's Gert, the Selvaggio's wise and loving housekeeper, with a rich history binding her to the family, and David, Gert's son, a young man in retreat from the world because he caused an auto accident that killed his wife. As the story continues, Ginny's cooking brings the spirit of her mother, her mother's friend from the time Ginny's parents married, a nurse who may or may not have been her father's lover and even Elena, David's wife. With what Ginny hears from the ghosts, and from those who love her, she learns to reach out and say, "I'm out here. I'm okay. I love you."
Skillfully rendered from Ginny's point of view, McHenry's debut novel is a touching tale about loss and grief, love and acceptance.Pub Date: April 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-9169-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2011
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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