No cheap tear-jerker here, but a novel that tackles challenging material with honesty and a clear eye.
A Wisconsin college student becomes a caretaker for a victim of Lou Gehrig’s disease and forms a tender, surprising friendship in this fresh, accomplished first novel.
Becoming a caretaker for a mid-30s woman paralyzed by ALS requires someone with perhaps more maturity than the college junior Bec, who applies for the part-time job. Bec tries hard to learn how to wash and groom her diminutive, wheelchair-bound employer, Kate Norris, who can’t move except to turn her head and whose mostly intelligible speech is interpreted by her seemingly devoted husband, Evan. Bec is awkward at first in their spacious, colorful home, but quick to learn, and she’s never short on compassion for the lovely, cultured Kate, who is degenerating at a sickeningly fast pace. When Kate comes to the alarming decision to ask Evan to move out of their house because he has developed another relationship, Bec feels Kate’s betrayal viscerally, as her own boyfriend of several months, Liam, a literature professor at her school, is married and sees Bec only on the sly. Over the several months that Bec works for Kate, Bec learns to cook, choose wine, throw dinner parties and do other grownup things that have eluded her while studying advertising and sharing a house with her party pal, Jill. The friendship between Bec and Kate strengthens to the point at which Bec actually becomes Kate’s voice. The novel moves deliberately to the inevitable death of Kate, yet Bec’s advocacy on behalf of her friends allows the end to feel more like a beginning—even a celebration. Wildgen’s attention to detail demonstrates impressive maturity and skill.
No cheap tear-jerker here, but a novel that tackles challenging material with honesty and a clear eye.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-35229-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
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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