An optimistic, feel-good story that celebrates love, community, goodness, and the creation of family, however it might...
A matchmaker who believes herself able to see love shimmering in the air must get through a series of personal setbacks in her own life.
In this follow-up to Dawson’s Matchmaking for Beginners (2018), Marnie MacGraw and Patrick Delaney return, and the story is told through their perspectives. Marnie is a 33-year-old Florida transplant to Brooklyn, a magically influenced matchmaker, and the owner of a flower shop that has become a community hangout space. She loves Patrick, a prickly artist with significant physical and mental scarring from an explosion that, years earlier, killed his then-girlfriend. The pair live in a Brooklyn brownstone, where Patrick led an almost hermitlike existence in the basement apartment before Marnie inherited and moved into the building. A one-time sculptor, he can no longer create because of the scarring and pain in his hands. The story begins nearly four years into their relationship, with Marnie longing for a baby, Patrick uninterested in being a parent, and the universe taking over their lives as surprise after surprise is dropped into their laps. A broken condom; the return of Tessa, a one-night stand (well, two-night, she and Patrick are quick to point out) with a child in tow; the opportunity for Patrick to put on an art show in a new medium with as-yet-unpainted work; the arrival of Marnie’s mom from Florida; and the constant ups and downs in the lives of a handful of neighborhood teenagers are just the tip of the iceberg. The chaos brings Marnie to life and causes Patrick to withdraw ever further into himself. Dawson has created a truly quirky story, filled with a little bit of magic (think unicorn glitter and sparkles) and a lot of love. This is a long read leisurely told, but there is enough tension to keep the reader racing through its pages.
An optimistic, feel-good story that celebrates love, community, goodness, and the creation of family, however it might appear.Pub Date: May 26, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5420-0646-0
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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