The good news is that John and Dweena overcome their excruciating shyness to find romance. A joy.
A comedy of misunderstandings blooms to perfection in Whorton’s (Approximately Heaven, 2003) enchanting and erudite caper, set in hillbilly eastern Tennessee.
Imagine an aspiring historian, smart, idealistic, and dogged, but with the unhappy knack of making wrong decisions. Then meet our narrator, 28-year-old John Tolley. Comfortably ensconced in Ohio as editor of a Civil War magazine, he abruptly moves to New York and winds up as a spit-roaster. However, research on his special interest, President Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, yields a clue to a missing Johnson scrapbook, and it becomes John’s goal to hunt it down and make history. Suckered into buying a rapidly expiring Plymouth Duster, he barely makes it to Tennessee. Once there, nothing is what it seems. A female mail-carrier appears to be stealing a newspaper, and a little man emerges from a hole to mug him. When it turns out that the little man is a harmless dog trainer, Boo Price, and the scrupulously honest mail carrier is his cousin Dweena, Whorton’s deadpan comic genius exploits the misunderstandings—here and elsewhere—for laugh-out-loud results. John rents a log house from Boo and learns about treeing coons and dipping tobacco (culture-shock, but no cheap shots). His big break comes when a prestigious history magazine offers to publish his Johnson article. Oops, sorry: the editor, Professor Luke Van Brun, has confused John with a Buchanan essayist; John’s own essay is, er, water-damaged. And so it goes. John’s quest for that missing scrapbook becomes more complicated when he crosses paths with Danielle, reporter for a cable news show looking for a big story, and more complicated still when the treacherous Van Brun tries to steal John’s lead. It’s all great fun, but there’s also a poignancy to John’s realization that he has “a screwiness, deep down,” which sent him on this wild-goose chase.
The good news is that John and Dweena overcome their excruciating shyness to find romance. A joy.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-4448-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
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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