A serviceable plot and characters bolstered by unusually sophisticated thinking about polygamy and its relationship to...
Questions of faith and family haunt a young woman fleeing from her isolated polygamist community.
In this follow-up to 2007’s Don’t You Marry the Mormon Boys, Jensen follows Zina Martin, the sister of the previous novel’s protagonist. Faced at age 16 with becoming a plural wife to an older man, Zina embarks on a doomed affair that leaves her alone and pregnant. Desperate, she abandons Gabriel’s Landing, her sheltered polygamist community in Utah. In the first of many fortunate plot points, Zina is picked up by an angelic African-American couple, who take her home to Chicago and treat her like a daughter. Zina slips easily into modern life: college degree, good job, an apartment of her own. But her past and the family she left behind still plague her. At one point, she tells a friend: “I don’t have one object, not one reminder of home. Not a picture or a letter or a quilt.” Zina especially wonders about her sister Louisa, who left Gabriel’s Landing to become a doctor. Zina’s quest to reunite with Louisa eventually connects the two books, and the sisters’ struggle to reconcile the worlds of secular society, conservative polygamy, and mainstream Mormonism dominates the book’s latter half. Jensen’s nuanced consideration of that struggle is the story’s greatest strength. She refrains from easy judgments, and her ability to present the Martin sisters’ genuine love for their home alongside its real pitfalls challenges readers to embrace the full complexity of polygamist communities. The rest of the plot, though, is less subtle and at times implausible. The ending seems predestined, and the difficult aspects of Zina’s story are rendered in an oddly unemotional fashion. For example, Zina undergoes a trauma shortly after arriving in Chicago, but the author quickly abandons that painful event and leaps months into the future. Jensen explains Zina’s sudden progress in bland, matter-of-fact prose: “Zina had been in Chicago for over a year. She had moved into an apartment with other girls her age, and learned to love the city and her job.” Secondary characters come and go with similarly little fanfare, often seeming more like plot devices than vibrant individuals. Such narrative distance and too-convenient plotting keep Zina and the other characters from becoming as compelling as the book’s broader themes.
A serviceable plot and characters bolstered by unusually sophisticated thinking about polygamy and its relationship to mainstream Mormonism.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-939967-19-0
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Jolly Fish Press
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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