Pretty sentences deliver a flimsy storyline and unbelievable characters.
An adolescent is obsessed with a mysterious, glamorous young woman in 1950s Manhattan.
Having been kicked out of prep school for smoking a cigar in the chapel, recently orphaned Gabriel Gibbs ends up living with his older brother Spencer in an apartment in Greenwich Village, where Spencer, ten years Gabriel’s senior, is completing a book of short stories. Gabriel idolizes Spencer and so does the author. He is a character without faults: generous, wise, handsome, and brilliant. While Spencer spends his days writing, Gabriel wanders the city. Along the way he hears about, then briefly sees, the beautiful Lillian Dawes. Her picture appears on the society pages with increasing frequency, Gabriel catches her dancing in the kitchen of a Cuban restaurant, and his aunt Lavinia mentions having befriended her on the SS Rotterdam, where Lillian showed extraordinary shooting skills. Lillian has no money but floats within the upper-class WASP world with ease. After Spencer’s nouveau riche friend/nemesis Clayton Prather tells Gabriel he has “plans” for Dawes, Gabriel wrangles an invitation to a weekend at Prather’s country place. There, Spencer and Lillian meet while Lillian displays her many talents and superior soul, equal only to Spencer’s own. Finally the plot, which for more than two thirds of the story has meandered along with Gabriel, rushes through Spencer and Lillian’s romance and its (obvious) connection to Spencer’s search for the lost heir to a fortune his father embezzled years earlier. While second-novelist Mosby (Private Altars, 1995) writes with a formal grace that only sometimes verges on the pretentious (references to The Great Gatsby don’t help), her characters seem to have been borrowed from the movies—eccentric aunt, Asian houseboy, communist moocher friend (not to mention Lillian herself)—and in spite of all the period detail carefully layered in, the tale has an artificial, unlived quality.
Pretty sentences deliver a flimsy storyline and unbelievable characters.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-621272-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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