An often mesmerizing look at a unique group of Americans.
A historical novel that explores the precarious position of pacifist Shakers during the American Civil War.
Austin Innes left his home, in what would later be Oklahoma, at an early age and took to a shiftless life of temporary romances. A group of strangers who call themselves Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing—and whom others simply call the Shakers—show him great kindness while giving him a boat ride. He ultimately joins their community in South Union, Kentucky, and becomes a schoolmaster. Meanwhile, Harry Littlebourne, a young Native American man of uncertain extraction, leaves the land in Ohio that his Quaker father left him and wanders into the same Shaker territory. He’s remarkably tight-lipped and almost childlike in his simplicity; Austin becomes his mentor, and they jointly assume a similar role for Amos Anger, a young orphan in town. But as the conflict between North and South crescendos, the Shakers are forced into a seemingly impossible quandary. As committed pacifists, they want to remain neutral and avoid military conscription by either side. They also staunchly believe in the equality of black people, who live freely among them, which complicates their efforts to stay out of the war. Austin wrestles with this predicament on his own; despite his unwavering devotion to his religious principles, he feels drawn to participating in the conflict, as he’s uncomfortable with the idea of being a passive witness. Meanwhile, Shaker locals Harvey Eades and Elder John Rankin write a letter to President Abraham Lincoln anxiously requesting an exemption from military service even as more of the community’s members elect to join the fray. In her debut novel, Stevens masterfully explains the complex contours of the Shaker predicament. For example, any assertion of neutrality led to their members being depicted as “collaborators or cowards.” She also shows how the Confederates found even more fuel for their disdain: “Slave and slaveholder alike received kind attention at Shaker hands, and it was chiefly this that the secessionists found intolerable.” Shakers were apparently known for their painstaking record-keeping, and most of the plot is based closely on the real-life journals of Eldress Nancy E. Moore and Elder Harvey Eades. The author’s historical research is impressively rigorous, and she nimbly brings to life the moral struggle of an intriguing, little-understood group of Americans. Furthermore, she ably dramatizes the plight of Kentucky—a state with no deficit of supporters for either side of the war—as its government also tried desperately to remain neutral. The chief failing of the book, however, is its pacing, as the plot unfolds too languorously; it also introduces a new, major subplot late in the story. Stevens is at her best when painting the big picture—the grand drama of the war and the specific tribulations of the Shakers, who loved their country but remained culturally separate from it. It’s hard to recall a fictional exploration of the Shakers that’s more historically searching or sensitive.
An often mesmerizing look at a unique group of Americans.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-9997517-0-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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