Profound, no, but sincere and heartfelt: could be the affirmative novel about 9/11 that a lot of readers are waiting for.
Maynard (Where Love Goes, 1995, etc.) rushes into the breach with the story of a 13-year-old girl whose mother is killed on September 11, 2001.
As it begins, former dancer Janet (good enough to have understudied in A Chorus Line) is an executive secretary at a company on the World Trade Center’s 87th floor, divorced from Wendy’s irresponsible father Garrett and happily remarried to wonderful, domestic, bass player Josh, father of Janet’s four-year-old son Louie. Maynard’s chapters on the apocalyptic day when Janet doesn’t come home—and on the surreal subsequent waiting period—are flatly descriptive. Josh and Louie are devastated; Wendy’s grief is compounded by guilty memories of typically teenaged sullenness and meanness. When Garrett turns up after four years of no contact, wanting to take Wendy with him to California, she blankly acquiesces. Everyone she meets there is a case study in loss: Garrett’s girlfriend Carolyn gave up her illegitimate baby two decades before; bookstore owner Alan has an institutionalized, autistic son and a wife who can’t deal with it; 17-year-old Violet has kept her baby but can’t manage him; cute skateboarder Todd (Wendy’s first kiss) is looking for the older brother separated from him when their parents divorced; Garrett himself has a disapproving mother who dies before he can resolve their relationship. There’s little surprising about these characters, or about the books Alan gives Wendy to help her cope (Anne Frank’s diary, A Member of the Wedding, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn). But when the whole mismatched crew gets together for an oddball Thanksgiving, it’s touching, as is Wendy’s ultimate realization that “something had begun to grow back in her . . . she was alive again.” A conclusion brings disaster to enough minor characters that a generally upbeat tone doesn’t seem too saccharine.
Profound, no, but sincere and heartfelt: could be the affirmative novel about 9/11 that a lot of readers are waiting for.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-24261-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
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
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
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