A quietly competent tale, with a few surprises, gentle humor, and a good feel for the journalist’s milieu, though ultimately...
When a sexy young widow comes on to him, a naïve cub reporter with big dreams perks up—then finds he’s gotten more than he bargained for, in this soft-spoken, mildly diverting debut from anthology editor Shreve.
Gordie is 22 and trying to fill the big shoes of his father, a famous Chicago journalist who died when Gordie was five. So Gordie starts small, as junior member of the obituary desk at the St. Louis Independent. He’s already put his ambition into practical use by creating a file of obits for not-yet-dead celebrities when a call comes from a local woman whose Irish wolfhound-breeding banker husband has just died. The widow, Alicia, wants a big spread, but when it becomes apparent that she wants much more, Gordie, after laying eyes on her, is only too happy to oblige. Before long the two are cavorting in the bed she once shared with the dearly departed, and, almost as soon, Gordie is helping her sell everything to begin a new life—with him. Meanwhile, his obit file having been discovered and condemned by his publisher, Gordie turns to other possibilities for advancing his career. He visits a late-night crime scene, which proves more ghoulish than gratifying, then, for inspiration, decides to visit Dallas, where his father hit pay dirt so many years before with the Kennedy assassination. He goes there also to check up on Alicia’s past, since seeds of doubt about her have been planted by her dead husband’s sister, and what Gordie finds gives him much food for thought. Back in St. Louis, Alicia, for all her sexiness, is becoming increasingly unstable, and Gordie has to resort to extreme measures to extricate himself—generating in the process the story of a lifetime.
A quietly competent tale, with a few surprises, gentle humor, and a good feel for the journalist’s milieu, though ultimately with nothing to make it more than adequate in its telling.Pub Date: June 7, 2000
ISBN: 0-395-98132-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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