An engaging debut.
A young woman travels to Italy and discovers her father’s secret past.
Olivia Bonocchio’s mother, who died when she was five, was an only child, and Olivia always assumed her father Luigi was too. Born in the Marche region, he arrived in America in 1944 and never discussed his past. When Luigi becomes ill with Alzheimer’s, Olivia, an art teacher in Manhattan, rearranges her life to grant him his last wish: that he die in the suburban home he was so proud to own. It is there she discovers an antique brass key and a deed to a house in Urbino, which prompt Olivia to investigate once her father is laid to rest. Barely three hours after signing the hotel register in Urbino, she is startled to meet a first cousin, Claudia, that she didn’t know she had. Over dinner that night at her cousin’s home, Olivia leafs through a box of photographs her father had sent his sister, now dead, over the years. No notes or letters. Only photos. The next day, a lawyer she contacts tries to persuade Olivia to forget the deed. He tells her that Luigi was a collaborator during the war. The house was owned by the Levi family. When it became illegal for Jews to own property, the father signed the house over to Luigi, who was his daughter’s friend. The Levis went into hiding and Luigi turned them in. Upon learning this, Olivia wishes she had never come. Is it possible her cousin, her lawyer, even a hotel maid, know her father’s character better than she? Olivia decides to stay and find out. Danford skillfully interweaves Luigi’s story with Olivia’s to reveal a complex truth.
An engaging debut.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2007
ISBN: 0-312-34902-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2006
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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