A potent exploration of youth, innocence, and the abuse of authority.
A surprise encounter prompts a woman to recall her experiences at a parochial school in Gschwandtner’s novel.
In the early 2000s, Susannah Greenwood travels from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco, and on her way to her hotel, she runs into Daria McQueen, a former classmate from Foxhall, a co-ed Quaker boarding school in Pennsylvania. The meeting takes Susannah back to the fall of 1960, when she entered the school as a sophomore. Foxhall offers its students a fresh start from tumultuous home lives, and she quickly falls in with a clique of popular girls—Daria, Jan, Faith, and Brady. She joins the diving team and falls in love with a senior named Wes Ritter and also begins a friendship with another new girl at Foxhall, the academically brilliant but socially awkward Moll Grimes. In addition to classes, Quaker meetings, and dances, Susannah experiences the heavy-handed authority of the stern, unyielding headmistress, Miss Margaret Bleaker, who has high expectations for Foxhall students. The tension resulting from the youthful desire to test boundaries eventually culminates in a dramatic misuse of power with devastating consequences for Moll and Miss Bleaker, leaving Susannah to ponder the cost of protecting a vulnerable friend. Overall, this is a deftly constructed coming-of-age story with well-drawn characters and the narrative momentum of a thriller. Gschwandtner (Carla’s Secret, 2013, etc.) is a gifted storyteller who ably balances the past and present throughout the novel and never puts a foot wrong. Susannah’s keen observations of life at the school and of her mother’s erratic behavior are sharp and perceptive. As the titular “other new girl,” Moll is depicted as bright but painfully shy, offering a sympathetic contrast between Susannah’s and Moll’s experiences. The supporting characters are equally well-developed; Wes, for example, struggles to reconcile his Quaker faith with his reluctance to register as a conscientious objector, and Miss Bleaker’s devotion to her position and the school is shown to be all-consuming.
A potent exploration of youth, innocence, and the abuse of authority.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63152-306-9
Page Count: 264
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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
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