Robards does a steamy, creditable job for those who don’t mind all those charred bodies.
Robards reprises elements of her successful Ghost Moon (1999): a southern setting, lovers with children, a serial killer, and enough graphic violence to appeal to the Hannibal Lecter fan club.
When billionaire Charles Haywood is found dead in his world-class racing stable in Kentucky bluegrass country, ostensibly driven to suicide by scandal and financial ruin, his daughter Alexandra, a photographer for coffee-table books about architecture, returns to sell her old Kentucky home, Whistledown Farms, and fire the staff. But Joe Welch, her dad’s “dead-sexy” manager, refuses to be fired. The father of three, he needs the money, and besides, he has a contract. Though the two begin as antagonists—he’s a pigheaded, macho, overbearing bully, she’s a cashmere-sweatered rich bitch with a spoiled teenaged half-sister—the plans of a serial killer (“the predator”) throw them together. The predator likes to kidnap victims, rape them, and burn them alive with kerosene. In one dreadful scene, Robards tells more about the immolation of a dog than some readers will want to know. During their first night at Whistledown, Alexandra is awakened by the predator, who roams the ante-bellum mansion at will. When she tries to pursue him, he knocks her over the head, and she and her sister Neely run through a thunderstorm hoping to find safety at Joe’s house. Half-unconscious and protected by only a thin nightie rendered transparent by the rain, Alex throws herself on Joe. In Robards’s own brand of first aid, they even take a shower together to get the blood and mud off her body. Joe’s solid pecs, and even more solid family values, rescue Alexandra and Neely from an uncertain future, and the Haywood cat (Hannibal, of course), along with the ghost of Charles Haywood, rescues them from the predator.
Robards does a steamy, creditable job for those who don’t mind all those charred bodies.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-671-78645-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000
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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