Barbara’s saga is powerfully imagined and profoundly insightful, but the novel’s stylistic challenges—frequent snippets of...
Poetic and tragic, a theologian’s debut traces a harrowing course of spiritual and psychological healing as a California woman fights to recover from resurfaced memories of childhood abuse.
Barbara’s ordeal begins after she emerges from being stuck in a darkened elevator, and her life rapidly unravels. No longer able to face her students in the classroom, she retreats to her home, alone and deteriorating mentally and physically until a concerned neighbor gives her the name of a good shrink. Barbara’s sessions with him advance fitfully. After weeks of sitting in silence, not uttering a word, she progresses to the point where she can briefly leave him the pieces of her beloved, broken cello, shattered when, in the depths of her despair, she dropped it over the upstairs railing at her house. And then, encouraged by his patience and sympathy, she slowly and meticulously shares her memories: her father experimenting on her with his set of dental tools; her father burying her under the house, straws left in her mouth for breathing; her mother lifting her from her playpen to set her hands and feet on the opened—and hot—oven door. As she grapples with these and other events in her childhood, however, Barbara also has more positive forces at work on her. Her nosy, good-hearted neighbor, the widow Josephine, involves her in a vastly different life next door. Her former love of gardening and music sustain her unexpectedly as she attempts to recover the life she had. And, above all, the steady stream of postcards from Daniel, whose work has taken him to England but whose heart remains with her, reminds her of other memories of the two of them together, loving memories that may help bring her back from the grip of her brutal past.
Barbara’s saga is powerfully imagined and profoundly insightful, but the novel’s stylistic challenges—frequent snippets of verse interspersed with voices past and present—at times seem excessive.Pub Date: April 15, 2002
ISBN: 1-58243-172-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
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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