A potentially interesting story sapped of interest by slow pacing and lack of character development.
Debut novel from the award-winning author of the story collection Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail (2013).
Rio Silvestri is a nurse living in Boulder, Colorado. She has a husband, Sal, and a daughter, Lily. Sal and Lily both know that Rio grew up in Japan and that she’s estranged from her father. What they don’t know is that, before she changed her name, Rio was Chizuru Akitani, daughter of the world-famous violinist Hiro Akitani. Nor do they know that, when she was 12 years old, Chizuru Akitani killed one of her classmates. When Hiro dies, Rio decides to go back to Japan for his funeral. While there, she discovers new truths about her father—and herself—and her carefully constructed life begins to unravel. For a book about murder, rage, and explosive family secrets, this novel is shockingly dull. The story moves at a plodding pace, all sense of momentum undercut by Luce’s apparent inability to distinguish telling details from narrative clutter. For example, there’s a whole paragraph devoted to “Sal’s famous blueberry-mint vinaigrette,” but Rio remains, throughout, a cipher. Momentous events occur, but the protagonist doesn’t really change, and readers will end the novel with no better sense of who or what Rio is—or who or what Chizuru was—than they had at the beginning. It emerges that Chizuru was an unhappy child, bullied at school and neglected by her father. Her mother, a free-spirited American artist, killed herself. But not every child who suffers adversity becomes a killer. Rio refers to the “black organ” inside her, which is a lovely metaphor but in no way illuminating. And the redemptive note on which the novel ends feels unearned—not in a moral sense but aesthetically—and disingenuous, self-help platitudes from a solipsistic heroine who has learned nothing from her journey.
A potentially interesting story sapped of interest by slow pacing and lack of character development.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-23858-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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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