An engrossingly intimate family portrait, but the narrative could be tightened.
In this fictionalized version of the author’s family history, matriarch Christina tells her own story, and then—from the afterlife—follows her descendants.
Christina’s own story follows a linear path, from her childhood in Sweden in the second half of the 19th century to her immigration to the United States and her arrival in Joliet, Ill., where she spent the rest of her life. After a few years as a domestic servant, Christina settles into a lackluster marriage, meeting her taciturn husband’s every need and giving birth to 10 children. Although Christina’s world is mostly defined by the walls of her home, and the author makes the limitations of that environment evident, her narration of family life is interspersed with remarks on notable moments in American and Chicago history that took place at the same time, blending the oral history with a textbook feel. After her death, Christina seamlessly transitions into telling the stories of her children as a detached observer, watching them grow up and start families of their own. The focus shifts to Walter, one of her sons, who faces professional and health challenges of his own, and then to his granddaughter, Julia, a fictional version of the author. In the second half of the book, Christina follows Julia’s struggle to care for her daughter, Anna Christina, who’s born with severe brain damage and remains medically fragile. Christina feels a particular connection to this great-great-granddaughter, who spends much of her life in the hospital and is unable to communicate verbally. Although exhausted by the reality of caring for a child with special needs, Julia begins to explore her family history and eventually travels to Sweden, where she visits Christina’s birthplace and forges her own connection with Christina. By fictionalizing this intimate history, the account achieves a sense of distance that doesn’t always benefit the story. Despite Anderson’s palpable compassion, particularly for her daughter and her condition, parts of the novel read more like a series of events than a coherent plot, which will leave readers feeling less engaged than such an emotionally compelling story should warrant. Also, the writing can be uneven, although the strong narrative voice remains one of the book’s most appealing attributes.
An engrossingly intimate family portrait, but the narrative could be tightened.Pub Date: April 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-1470028510
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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
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