A Summertime-like romance between older lovers, set in modern-day China, from perennial bestseller Michael (Acts of Love, 1997, etc.). Novice designer Miranda Graham, 40, has come to Beijing from Boulder, Colorado, to discuss the production of her cashmere clothing with Chinese manufacturers. As she waits for a cab in the shoving airport crowd, she’s rescued by Yuan Li, 55, the head of an important construction company who has come to see off a friend. Overcoming Miranda’s reserve (and honoring the venerable tradition of overseas romances doubling as travelogues), half-American Li spends a week showing her around Beijing, introducing Miranda (and the reader) to contemporary Chinese life and a mouthwatering feast of its cuisine. The two draw closer, cook a meal together at Li’s courtyard house in Beijing, and finally consummate their love at a hotel in Xi’an, where they have gone to see the 6,000 terra-cotta warriors built for the tomb of the first Emperor. But the villainous Chinese state security bureau complicates their wonderful relationship. It views Miranda as a courier of ’subversive— literature because she agreed to deliver a letter to the parents of a Boulder acquaintance, and her lover is under suspicion as a result of their affair. Used to such scrutiny, Li carries on as if it were not there. But Miranda decides she can—t live in such a society, and Li decides he can—t go to America. Instead of continuing an enriching international relationship, which would not be too difficult since Miranda begins a partnership with an older Chinese designer, the pair decide to part forever, keeping their memories and that “certain smile” of perfect love. Besides the excellent food, the authors create believable conversations between intelligent people, a rarity in romance fiction. But after a humdinger of a first half, the ending seems forced. (Doubleday Book Club main selection; Literary Guild selection; ad/promo)
Pub Date: May 5, 1999
ISBN: 0-517-70325-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
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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