A story about survival that is heartbreakingly honest and wryly funny, perfect for fans of Jojo Moyes and Elizabeth Berg.
A woman faces a new life after surviving a plane crash in this moving story from Center (Happiness for Beginners, 2015, etc.).
Margaret Jacobsen has always been afraid of flying—which is why she’s extra hesitant to get in a plane flown by her pilot-in-training boyfriend, Chip, on Valentine’s Day. When Chip proposes in the air, Margaret has everything she’s ever wanted: an MBA, a great job lined up, and now the fiance of her dreams. But then Margaret’s biggest nightmare becomes a reality: The plane crashes. Chip walks away without a scratch while Margaret has severe burns on her neck and a spinal cord injury. Suddenly, everything about Margaret’s life has changed: Her job offer is rescinded, Chip can’t cope with her injuries, and she may never walk again. Now, Margaret has only her family to depend on—her well-meaning but controlling mother, her loving father, and her black-sheep sister, Kitty, who returns to town after years of estrangement. As her family members try in their own ways to motivate Margaret, she also has to get through physical therapy with Ian, the world’s grumpiest Scottish physical therapist. He has a prickly exterior, but Margaret slowly begins to realize that there may be more to him than she initially thought. A story that could be either uncompromisingly bleak or unbearably saccharine is neither in Center’s hands; Margaret faces her challenges with a sense of humor that feels natural. She has days when the reality of her changed life hits her and she can’t get out of bed, and she has moments where she and Kitty laugh so hard they cry. What she ultimately learns is that while her life may be much different than she expected and she may never be fully healed, as Ian puts it, “It’s the trying that heals you.” Margaret learns to take control of her own life in the wake of loss and change, trying to form a life she wants instead of a life everyone else wants for her. Center’s characters, especially Margaret and Kitty, leap off the page with their unique voices, and their relationships evolve slowly and satisfyingly. Although this is largely the story of Margaret learning to make the most of her life, it’s also a touching and believable love story with plenty of romantic-comedy flourishes.
A story about survival that is heartbreakingly honest and wryly funny, perfect for fans of Jojo Moyes and Elizabeth Berg.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-14906-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
