Leveen’s enthusiastic historical novel pushes the classic teenage romance aside to give greater weight to a mother’s love...
A lusty, if lengthy, retelling of Romeo and Juliet from the nurse’s perspective.
With the largest number of lines in Shakespeare’s play after the two lovers, wet nurse Angelica takes center stage in Leveen’s (The Secrets of Mary Bowser, 2012) second novel, which begins 14 years before the fateful five days spanned by the drama. Angelica’s tale is one of poverty and sorrow tempered by a long and happy marriage. Her six sons were victims of the plague that periodically afflicted the Italian city of Verona in the 14th century, and as the novel opens, she is about to lose a seventh child, a daughter, born on Lammas Eve, the same day on which Lady Cappelletta gives birth to Juliet. Angelica’s husband, Pietro, with whom she has spent more than 30 devoted, sexually fulfilling years, accepts the assistance of Friar Lorenzo and steers Angelica away from her grief into the role of live-in wet nurse to Juliet. And the plan works: Angelica becomes wholly devoted to her new charge, forming a bond that begins to matter more than her marriage. Pietro’s subsequent death in one of the many violent incidents afflicting the unruly city only intensifies Angelica’s commitment to her young mistress. By the time Romeo puts in his first appearance, in the book’s final quarter, the stage is set for the inevitable events, although Leveen adds to the tension with a plot modification all her own. Lingering over Angelica’s emotional dilemmas and the political feuding, the author’s long-anticipated focus on the star-crossed lovers seems almost incidental when it arrives. After the tragedy unfolds, it’s left to Angelica to live on and mourn.
Leveen’s enthusiastic historical novel pushes the classic teenage romance aside to give greater weight to a mother’s love and losses.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5744-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Emily Bestler/Atria
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
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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