A winningly told tale filled with regional color.
Hopkinson (The Salt Roads, 2003, etc.) sets her latest in the fictional Caribbean nation of Cayaba.
As the story opens, narrator Calamity Lambkin is attending her father’s funeral. Fifty-some years old, she is feeling the first effects of menopause, which in her case include a psychic ability to find lost things. We meet her daughter Ife, who is disturbed whenever unconventional Calamity swears or expresses unenlightened opinions, and her grandson Stanley. Calamity goes home from the cemetery with a stranger, has “funeral sex” with him and then gets roaring drunk on her father’s homemade liquor. Waking up on the beach with a crushing hangover the next morning, she finds a small child in the sand, nearly drowned. She takes him in, calls him Agway and attempts to discover his origins. Noting certain physical peculiarities suggestive of aquatic adaptations, Calamity begins to think that her foundling is one of the merpeople of island lore. Meanwhile, objects from her past keep reappearing, timed with hot flashes: her childhood toys and books, a bloody machete, even the cashew grove her father planted on another island. In addition to these fantastical elements, we are introduced to Caribbean customs and politics (dominated by tourism and the influence of multinationals), and we learn of the day-to-day experiences of people negotiating tradition and modernity. We meet characters from several strata of society, including a visiting marine biologist and the neighbor who looks after Agway while Calamity goes to her job on the main island. Flashbacks offer glimpses of Calamity’s youth, and a historical narrative from slave-trading days lays the foundation for the contemporary story.
A winningly told tale filled with regional color.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2007
ISBN: 0-446-57691-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 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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