An ambitious novel that explores grief with elements of the fantastic but sometimes stumbles on its own implausible efforts.
In a novel reworked after a self-published debut, Gurley (Deep Breath Hold Tight, 2014, etc.) follows the lives of identical twins Eleanor and Esmerelda as they struggle through a reality that is shaped and reshaped by tragedy and mysterious, otherworldly events.
When Eleanor and Esmerelda are 6, their family is torn apart by a devastating accident that takes Esmerelda’s life and leaves Eleanor and her parents suffering from a corrosive mix of grief and resentment. As Eleanor gets older, the effects of her twin’s death linger, and her family becomes ever more fractured and dysfunctional, forcing her to care for her withdrawn, alcoholic mother. Eleanor endures, despite crushing abuses, with an almost saintly determination until a day when she is inexplicably thrown out of her ordinary reality and into a strange and dreamy alternate one. This happens several times—always unexpectedly, always to someplace new—and these bewildering journeys slowly draw Eleanor into the desires of a stranger who wields enormous powers and seems peculiarly invested in her family’s happiness. The storyline plays with time, leaping through years and generations, lingering on Eleanor’s teenage years and hopping ahead in a few places like unlikely, but convenient, jump-cuts. While this often creates a satisfying sensation of events spooling out and connections snapping into place, it sometimes wavers into a neatly plotted lull where there is a lack of both surprises and lasting consequences. The entire world of the novel droops under the Witt family’s unhappiness; tragedy piles onto even the supporting characters to a degree that is either unlucky or unlikely. Despite the novel's somber excess, its characters are engaging and pleasantly written. Their persistent appeal, coupled with some beautifully imagined other realities, is enough to draw the reader onward to the end.
An ambitious novel that explores grief with elements of the fantastic but sometimes stumbles on its own implausible efforts.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90351-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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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