Quiet, lyrical and probing—a jewel of a novel.
Leon’s (A Theory of All Things, 2010, etc.) evocative novel centers on two aging sisters, one mentally challenged and the other her caretaker, whose home is unexpectedly joined by two more family members.
Septuagenarian Grace knows something is wrong with her even before the doctor confirms it. Cancer. She can’t stop worrying about what will happen to her older sister, Baby. For nearly her entire life, Grace has been caring for Baby, feeding her, dressing her, taking her to the bathroom, administering her insulin shots, keeping her supplied with her beloved crayons. She can’t imagine who would be willing or able to care for her large, opinionated, mentally disabled sister who laughs like Santa Claus and assigns colors to everything around her. Grace even tries, unsuccessfully, to take matters into her own hands. Out of the blue, their niece Lily arrives on their doorstep along with her young son, Walter. They arrive from New York City bearing little besides scars: Track marks can be seen on Lily’s thin arms, while Walter carries the recent memory of being surrendered to the Department of Social Services. The four try to get used to one another as they gear up for the yearly family Fourth of July gathering, where carloads of aunts, uncles and cousins descend on Grace’s house, the family home where she and her siblings grew up. The story is told over the span of three summer months, and Leon switches perspective among the four main characters, each of whom experiences memories and flashbacks that help illuminate his or her character. The use of imagery is masterful, from Grace’s memories of Baby as a girl, kept cruelly in a cage by their parents, to Baby’s many interpretations of color. Leon’s descriptions of the small town, the house and the landscape create a sense of place that is vivid and tangible. With a clear, perceptive eye, she explores the tension of family relations, the realities of aging and dying, the gnawing need of addiction and the complexities of mental illness. Leon’s characters are filled with humanity and individuality, and readers will no doubt hope for even more from her.
Quiet, lyrical and probing—a jewel of a novel.Pub Date: June 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1496171207
Page Count: 208
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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