A literary turn from an author known for mysteries (Blue Deer Thaw, 2000, etc.).
Dulcy Remfrey is returning from a party when she gets a phone call. Phone calls aren’t exactly common in 1904, so she assumes the worst: her father’s dead. As it happens, he’s not, but neither is he well, and it seems that he has misplaced a very large sum of money. His business partner, Victor—also, once upon a time, Dulcy’s fiance—wants her to leave New York immediately and head for Seattle, hopeful that she might tease the truth of the missing fortune from her father’s syphilis-addled brain. Victor, a man with violent tendencies, is dismayed both by the prospect of being ruined—Walton was supposed to be returning from Africa with the proceeds from selling several mines—and the presence of the woman who jilted him. When Walton dies before anyone can figure out what’s happened to Victor’s money, Dulcy decides that her only option is to disappear. Thus, Dulcy Remfrey turns herself into the young widow Mrs. Nash. This baroque setup is nicely balanced by Harrison’s prose; the narrative voice here is restrained, with just a hint of quiet irony. And there’s the fact that, as fantastical as the scenario might seem, Walton Remfrey is an entirely believable Gilded Age figure: a mining magnate who got his start digging copper as an orphan in Cornwall, a lowborn man who built an empire with hard labor, constant hustle, and a lack of regard for ethics. He’s a raconteur and a libertine as much as he is an engineer and entrepreneur. Indeed, how readers react to this novel depends in large part on how beguiling they find Walton. While this is ostensibly Dulcy’s tale, she is trapped in a Seattle apartment with her dying father—not to mention the volatile Victor—for almost a third of the book, and, even after he dies, the story of her reinvention is, again and again, interrupted by vignettes from her travels with her father. Some readers will enjoy these picaresque episodes, while those who require narrative momentum will likely find them distracting.
Thoughtful, richly written historical fiction.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61902-928-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION
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Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
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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. 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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PROFILES
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
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Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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