A feminist tale for all good men and women who fancy they sleep well at night.
A sweet little allegory with an afterbite as a sad, lonely housewife reaches adventure and despair on her flying scooter: the first US appearance for Belgium-born writer and translator Nirgad.
Layla, one of five daughters whose names start with L, lives a straitened suburban life in a cold, tight house with her own three perfect daughters and a silent, cold husband when she discovers that the rusty scooter out back can fly. First, she asks it to fly her to Alaska but is put off when the resident talking mink tells her there’s nothing but whiteness to be seen. Her sisters are well-intentioned but suspicious: Liora, the oldest, who bottles elixirs to keep her family nice and small; Lenora, the loose, unmarried one with a frigid, unfeeling heart; Lihi, the youngest, who “hadn’t learned any tricks yet”; and the sad dead sister, Luna, who was torn apart by the Winds at age 12 after the fatal pact made by their mother. Luna can come back occasionally because the sisters have promised the Winds never to love a man while he lies asleep—a promise Layla will break when she meets her Prince, for, once she gets going, there’s no stopping Layla. She flies to Prague and discovers her voice, which was always too timid to be heard. She stays out later than she should, and her husband begins to fume and offers her an ultimatum: either stay or lose her daughters. Will this seemingly innocuous little fairy tale end happily or tragically? Nirgad relies on a breezy, ironical tone, never letting the reader quite know whose side she’s on but just taking delight in telling the story. Her chatty, knowing approach is winning, leaving much to ponder in this modern-day morality tale that fathoms depths of the heart as profoundly as might Madame Bovary.
A feminist tale for all good men and women who fancy they sleep well at night.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2002
ISBN: 1-58567-313-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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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