A lyrical, dramatic first novel, from the author of a well- received story collection (Alligator Dance, 1994), traces the passages and passions of women's lives with an ardent empathy that will remind many of the fiction of Barbara Kingsolver. Peery's richly detailed story is set in Mexico and southwest Texas over the past 50 years. It begins with the rough journey toward womanhood of (Mar°a) Luisa Cant£, who grows up in the impoverished town of Salsipuedes, both victimized and shaped by her family's ill luck and her culture's self-denying religiosity. Later, when she's a young unmarried mother and again pregnant, Luisa is hired by Texas farmer Thomas Hatch and becomes maid to his arrogant, abrasive wife Edwina (``Eddie''). Both mistress and servant deliver babies soon thereafter, and their own fates and those of their children become forever entwined. Peery creates an eloquent contrast between the imperious Eddie, who'll live out her days regretting and atoning for the harm she can't stop causing, and the serene (though not servile) Luisa, who will keep for many years the secret ``don Tom†s'' entrusts to her and will survive, in her fashion, the loss of loved ones and her realization that girlhood dreams dissolve in adult compromises and disappointments (``I thought I would be better than I am''). The novel is flawed by occasional sentimentality and infrequent intrusions of melodramatic contrivances (e.g., Vietnam, draft-dodging, and pot-smoking) that seem to betray a determination to make its episodes representative of the several eras it covers so capably. Other episodes, however- -such as Eddie's confrontation with a gang of Mexican kids who claim her car has run one of them over—vibrate with energy and tension. A strong story, peopled with credible, complex characters with whom we come, in some cases despite ourselves, to identify.
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14719-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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