Neatly packaged beach diversion.
A Nantucket house sparks romance and mystery in the latest from Green (Second Chance, 2007, etc.).
Windermere is a glorious beach house on the shores of Nantucket. The home has been the site of riotous parties, romance and tremendous loss. The Powell family has inhabited Windermere for generations. Nan Powell—a woman of a certain age—is the current occupant. Despite suffering the loss of her husband on Windermere’s beach, Nan decided to stay put and raise her son, Michael, in Nantucket. Now alone in her large home, Nan refuses to downsize. She adores rambling around in her home and watching the developers drool over her nine acres of oceanfront property. As an aging widow, Nan has earned a reputation as a bit of an eccentric—this suits her just fine. Her cavalier attitude catches up with her when she finds out that all of her investments have tanked and she is out of cash. To make ends meet, Nan decides to let out rooms at Windermere. She dusts off the furniture and writes an ad. Woosh. A breath of fresh air enters the somewhat musty home as Nan welcomes her boarders. The boarders make up an odd lot: There’s Daniel, newly out of the closet and estranged from his wife; Daff, a single mother trying to find herself and deal with an unruly teenage daughter; and Michael, Nan’s son, a refugee from New York after an affair with his boss turns sour. The combination of Nan’s meddling and Windermere’s magic brings unexpected romance. As love blossoms all around her, Nan comes to terms with her future. Spending a few hours combing through the gardens and beaches of Green’s Nantucket is a great way to make a long plane ride seem much shorter. And if you can’t recall much of the plot after turning the last page, so what?
Neatly packaged beach diversion.Pub Date: June 17, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-670-01885-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
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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