Crown offers a waggish tale in which an amiable fox terrier lives out a Forrest Gump adventure.
A whimsical debut novel set during one of history’s ugliest periods.
It’s 1938. Levi, a smart fox terrier, lives in Berlin with professor Carl Liliencron, his wife, Rahel, and their children, Georg and Else. Carl is a renowned expert on plankton, and the Liliencrons occupy a luxurious town house provided by the German National Academy of Sciences. However, the Liliencrons are Jewish, and Hitler’s fanatics are increasingly violent. Carl reacts by lightheartedly changing Levi’s name to Sirius, but then Kristallnacht occurs and the Liliencrons face transport to concentration camps. Rahel has a childhood friend in Hollywood, the actor Peter Lorre, who helps with papers and money to escape. In the U.S.A., the Liliencrons explore Tinseltown, meeting and interacting with movie stars of fame and fortune—Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, etc. As professor Liliencron becomes Crown, the chauffeur, the charismatic Levi/Sirius earns a film contract from Jack Warner, who dubs him Hercules. Anthropomorphism be damned, author Crown succeeds in employing the wiry little canine’s point of view for a good portion of the story. A pop star of the first magnitude, Levi/Sirius/Hercules becomes a Chaplinesque character, but then he loses Warner’s confidence and is banished to the circus. Crown then ramps up the fantasy, with the pup being shanghaied to Germany, where this supposedly devious “Jewish pet" becomes Hansi, Hitler’s favorite companion. The Liliencrons, meanwhile, wax and wane among the stars until they make the decision at war’s end to return to Berlin. World War II was a grotesque human tragedy, but Crown has employed the obscenity of the Holocaust to create a fable about family, the timeless connection between human and dog, and the nature of identity.
Crown offers a waggish tale in which an amiable fox terrier lives out a Forrest Gump adventure.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 9781501144998
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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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