An often beautifully written work that lays its characters low with grief and lifts them high with the bliss of travel.
Abdul-Baki’s (Sands of Zulaika, 2007, etc.) novel explores the highs and lows of a marriage rocked by tragedy and infidelity.
After Joy and Richard Amis’ baby is stillborn, they travel to Granada, Spain, to try and recover from the loss. However, it doesn’t hold the cure for what’s ailing their marriage. As they grow apart emotionally, Joy seeks adventure and escape, while Richard seeks comfort in Belinda Bericini, a woman who’s remarkably similar to Joy is some ways. The marriage slowly disintegrates and finally dissolves when Joy discovers Richard’s affair. Three years later, though, they reconnect in Istanbul and rekindle their relationship. Then Richard divulges one last secret: He has a daughter from his time with Belinda, although the affair is now long over. It turns out that Belinda is dying, and she wants Richard and Joy to raise the child. After Joy meets Belinda, she must reconcile herself with the idea of becoming a mother through such unconventional means. Richard and Joy’s turbulent relationship is an engrossing and sometimes painfully intimate study of a marriage interrupted. Over the course of the story, the characters take lusciously described jaunts to Spain, Turkey, and Tunisia; the unique magic of travel is the golden thread that ties this work together. The characterization, however, is uneven. Belinda essentially exists for the sole purpose of giving Joy and Richard what they want and to dispense New-Age–style philosophy: “The only thing permanent in the universe is its transience.” She’s a vehicle for other characters’ growth but not one in her own right. By contrast, Joy is the emotional core of the novel, experiencing the full spectrum of human feeling. Readers will understand her pain as she deals with the long-lasting consequences of an affair.
An often beautifully written work that lays its characters low with grief and lifts them high with the bliss of travel.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-427-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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