One of the best explorations of a child’s mind and heart in recent fiction, and its talented author’s best book yet.
The technique of portraying adult experience through a child’s eyes and words—accomplished in classic works as otherwise dissimilar as What Maisie Knew and The Catcher in the Rye—is knowingly adopted by the Whitbread Award–winning British author (Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance, 2005, etc.).
His family’s adventure abroad is recounted by nine-year-old Lawrence, a precociously ruminative charmer who intuits connections between historical and astronomical information and the emotional unraveling of his “mum” Hannah, who has spirited Lawrence and his bratty younger sister Jemima away from home in Scotland to Rome (where Hannah had formerly lived, happily), far from the ex-husband who, Hannah insists, is stalking them. As the itinerant trio ricochet among stays with various old friends of Hannah’s, Lawrence hesitantly adapts to new surroundings while finding refuge in caring for his beloved hamster Hermann and summarizing for us what he has learned from potted histories of the misdeeds of notorious men. His kid’s-eye views of favorite atrocities orchestrated by Caligula and Nero, for example, are cockeyed delights that feature hilariously inconsistent misspellings. The reader wonders from the beginning whether Hannah’s shrill denunciations of the children’s father are to be trusted. When they return to Scotland to confront the evil their dad supposedly embodies (comparable, in Lawrence’s imagination, to a galaxy-swallowing Black Hole), things take a violent, poignant turn for the worse. The bleak concluding pages hold two contrasting possibilities in a heart-rending balance: Will Lawrence inherit Hannah’s self-destructive instability, or will his innate intelligence and goodness rescue him from her influence? This is the novel that Patrick McCabe’s over-praised The Butcher Boy ought to have been, redeemed by Kneale’s sure-handed restraint.
One of the best explorations of a child’s mind and heart in recent fiction, and its talented author’s best book yet.Pub Date: July 22, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-52625-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
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
PROFILES
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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