Harris (Coastliners, 2002, etc.) does a creditable job re-creating the atmosphere of a very distant time and place, and...
Baroque thriller, set in 17th-century France, about the travails of a young nun who must keep silent as a charlatan priest tries to take over her convent.
When Mère Isabelle arrives in 1610 to take charge as the new abbess of the convent of Sainte-Marie-Mère on the remote island of Noirs Moustiers, Soeur Auguste knows right away that something is seriously wrong. For one thing, Mère Isabelle’s chaplain, Père Colombin, is not a priest at all but rather the mountebank actor Guy LeMerle. How can Soeur Auguste know this? For the same reason that she can’t reveal his identity: LeMerle is her old lover and the father of her daughter Fleur (who lives in the convent with her mother). Soeur Auguste (neé Juliette) has had a colorful past: Raised by Gypsies, she was educated by an Italian Jew and toured for some years with a troupe of wandering actors headed by LeMerle. Once a courtier with patrons among the aristocracy, LeMerle lost favor after one of his productions was denounced as blasphemous by an outraged bishop, and he was thereafter reduced to scouring the provinces for an audience. It was a difficult life, but there were compensations: the beautiful and talented Juliette fell in love with LeMerle and stood by him in all his difficulties. He repaid her by deserting her, pregnant, in the middle of the night. The nuns took in Juliette and her daughter, and the convent proved to be an agreeable home for both—until the arrival of the new abbess and LeMerle. Soon Fleur is taken away from Juliette and a new austerity regime begins. Juliette has the goods on LeMerle—but he has the power to return Fleur. So it’s a stalemate. But what on earth is he after? Let’s just say it has something to do with revenge, which as we all know is a dish best eaten cold.
Harris (Coastliners, 2002, etc.) does a creditable job re-creating the atmosphere of a very distant time and place, and infuses it with a sharp if somewhat obvious tale.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-055912-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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