The author vividly imagines his period, but not his characters, who are little more than fate-buffeted puppets.
Irish paupers flee famine and pestilence in screenwriter Behrens’s grim first novel.
Fergus O’Brien is the teenaged son of sharecroppers on the Carmichael farm. When the potato blight destroys their food source in 1846, the O’Briens resist eviction but fall ill with typhus. Sole survivor of the fever and of the family cabin’s destruction by fire, Fergus is sent to a workhouse, soon closed by plague. He encounters the Bog Boys, a gang of juvenile outlaws captained by a girl named Luke. They attack Carmichael’s food hoard, resulting in the massacre of the landlord’s family (including Fergus’s first love, Phoebe) and of the Bog Boys (including his second love, Luke). Fergus joins a cattle drive to Dublin, from which he takes ship for Liverpool. On the journey, he meets Arthur, who tells him of work to be had as a railroad-building “navvy” in Wales. The duo rest at a bordello, where Fergus is nearly lulled into a cushy life as a male prostitute. Instead, he heads for Wales, signs on as a navvy and lodges at Muldoon’s, where he meets his third love, Molly. Fergus and Molly head back to Liverpool and, with the help of a kind innkeeper, ship out as steerage passengers bound for Montreal. Molly suffers a miscarriage and mood swings, but she augments the couple’s finances by running a card game onboard. When Fergus breaks a promise to Molly by climbing the mast to spot land, she makes a wager with fur-trader Ormsby, who wants to enlist Fergus as an apprentice, that will later cause Fergus to abandon her. He disembarks with Ormsby, who falls ill with fever in Montreal. Fergus uses his ailing patron’s ample cash to launch a horse-dealing business and is last seen making for Vermont, resisting the temptation to search for Molly.
The author vividly imagines his period, but not his characters, who are little more than fate-buffeted puppets.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2006
ISBN: 1-58642-117-4
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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
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