No blue skies here. Cold-bladed realism that “gets all the little pink muscles moving under [your] skin.” And dialogue to...
A second sizzler about marginalized outcasts follows Luna’s scalding but artful debut Brave New Girl (not reviewed) and falls in line with this publisher’s paperback stable of brilliantly trashy gutter novelists.
Old master James M. Cain would smile to his ear canals at Luna’s opening: “My mother picked me up in Holding and smelled like baby powder and Vaseline lotion when she hugged me.” Hardened but underweight young Melody Booth is paroled from prison after three years. White and seemingly allergic to sunlight, she hasn’t eaten meat in two and a half of those years and tosses her first hamburger in the restroom of a fast-food stop (“My cuticles were white and raw, nails bitten down, skin flaking off my fingertips like paint”). Though she’s a high school graduate, Mel turns down an office job offered by her parole officer and hires on manhandling smelly, sloshy port-a-potties, falls in with bad old buddy Chick Rodriguez, and sucks down six-packs. Living with her mother in Mill Valley, she sorely misses her brother Gary, who’s doing life at San Quentin—but she doesn’t want to see him. Did mother’s heavy abuse lead to her kids’ hard times? Mother’s changed for the better but is still a fake-pearls, lip-gloss airhead with a cleanliness mania. Memories of bad days at Staley pop up and hurt: being held down as a razor cuts the word juera into her arm and later slices fine lines in her vagina. And she gets her rib stove in. Why did she do three and Gary get life? The answer hangs over the novel. A hint: mother’s lover slaps Mel into the garbage; three years later, it’s payback. That crazy Gary. But that’s all, you know, like, cool, right? Sure.
No blue skies here. Cold-bladed realism that “gets all the little pink muscles moving under [your] skin.” And dialogue to die for.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7434-3995-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: MTV Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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