The Brady Bunch gone bad: a rambling story, however sad its premise, in which very little actually happens.
Lugubrious debut about life in a large unhappy Australian family during the 1950s and ’60s.
The Wheatleys may not be the best premise on which to hang a tale. The problem boils down, basically, to Jack Wheatley, who was a POW in WWII and never got over the trauma of it. His wife Martha and six children are happiest when he’s away—and, fortunately for them, he spends most of his spare time at the pub, rarely coming home until late at night. By this time, he is invariably drunk and abusive, taking out his frustrations on whoever happens to be around. Martha has grown so accustomed to Jack’s fits of temper that she barely notices the effect they have on the children, and it’s eldest daughter Jill who tries to stand up for her brothers and sisters. Still, most of the Wheatley children—far from hating Jack—simultaneously fear and worship their father. Daughter Christine tries constantly to get him to tell her tales of the war, and even Jill feels that Jack has somehow, through his troubled past, earned the right to be a lout. As the children grow up and begin to take their first steps into the adult world, however, they’re all haunted by their unhappy childhoods and find themselves ill-at-ease in a larger world, which they fear as much as they did their own home. Jill’s brother Johnnie begins to run around with a gang, and other brother Matthew is drafted into the Australian army during Vietnam. Eventually, in a typical gesture, Jack throws the teenaged Jill out of the house for coming home late one night. For her, it’s a blessing, since it forces her to start life on her own.
The Brady Bunch gone bad: a rambling story, however sad its premise, in which very little actually happens.Pub Date: April 8, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-31228-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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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