A haunting, original meditation that engages all the senses.
A teenager living in a dwindling Indiana commune takes care of an old man, grieves her brother’s death, and delivers a newcomer’s baby.
Van Eerden's (Glorybound, 2012) second novel continues probing the lives of small-town residents with sentences that crackle as if broadcast by radio waves. “Even my sad thoughts might be beautiful ones. Maybe they’re the most beautiful of all,” says Omi Ruth. The commune, Dunlap Fellowship of All Things in Common, intended for sharing life as Jesus’ disciples did, has shrunk from 22 families until hardly anyone remains. It’s teetering on the brink of extinction—“the Common Purse that never has enough in it to go around”—when Tracie, an itinerant pregnant woman, shows up seeking shelter and fueling Omi’s imagination. An avid National Geographic reader and mosaic maker, Omi wants her name “in a poem, not a Bible encyclopedia.” Her characterization of experiences she feels unprepared for—of her first period she says, “the light doesn’t reach where I am. And another drop of my womb’s blood leaves me. The bright thick red leaves”—contrasts with ordinary desires. Living in a house called Solomon’s Porch, she wishes for “a real wraparound porch, a real swing to swing on alone”—the stuff of mainstream Americana. These desires shape her interactions with young men outside Solomon’s Porch and help form her close bond with her brother, Wood. His death punctuates her loneliness, and so when elderly Northrup is carried home to convalesce, Omi spends days in one-way conversation until he, too, dies. To honor Wood, she breaks the Common Purse’s rules, ordering an elaborate tombstone “engraved in cursive that moves like waves of water.” Omi and Tracie’s friendship grows into a sisterhood when Omi learns that both women shared a love for Wood.
A haunting, original meditation that engages all the senses.Pub Date: April 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-943665-08-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Vandalia Press/West Virginia Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
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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