A playful but challenging cautionary tale.
The relationship between a divergently motivated man and woman flares and fades—but these aren’t average people.
Astrid is a meteor of musical talent, reminiscent of Janis Joplin or Amy Winehouse. Famous on MTV and recognized internationally, she’s also drug-dependent, and in Henry Sinclair, she has found the perfect package: a drug-supplying boyfriend. But Henry has his own agenda. An ambitious British psychiatrist, he’s hoping, despite conflicts with his boss, to make his reputation with a book and also with a patient he calls BirdBoy. Henry’s self-motivated involvement with bright-burning Astrid drives this fractured contemporary tale that switches between the second person for Astrid—“You have waited and Henry has not come”—and Henry’s first-person point of view. Scenes cut, cross, and interconnect to compose a cubist portrait of the relationship: the couple’s meet-cute at the Eliot Perlman Wellness Center in Manhattan, Astrid’s first paid gig; their prickly camping holiday on a Greek island; her road trip; his laboratory; her visit to a bizarre rehab clinic in Paris. Glimpses of satisfying early moments contrast with Astrid’s neediness and Henry’s chilly limitations: “I am not the kind of man who gets in deep.” This caustic tale of toxic co-dependency comes with copious drug-taking, psychological theorizing, and oblique self-scrutiny: “Soon enough there will be no more easy choices at all and that is a phantom tragedy that escapes these two eyes and breathes only into the future.” Genn, a neuroscientist and artist, displays strength in her intensity and scene painting, like Astrid’s performance at a substance-fueled gig or the blackly comic description of three naked men attempting to revive her after she chokes on a doughnut. But the stylistic density swaddles the relationship in cerebral layers.
A playful but challenging cautionary tale.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-91150-886-1
Page Count: 276
Publisher: And Other Stories
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
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 vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.
When a man accused of rape turns up dead, an Early American town seeks justice amid rumors and controversy.
Lawhon’s fifth work of historical fiction is inspired by the true story and diaries of midwife Martha Ballard of Hallowell, Maine, a character she brings to life brilliantly here. As Martha tells her patient in an opening chapter set in 1789, “You need not fear….In all my years attending women in childbirth, I have never lost a mother.” This track record grows in numerous compelling scenes of labor and delivery, particularly one in which Martha has to clean up after the mistakes of a pompous doctor educated at Harvard, one of her nemeses in a town that roils with gossip and disrespect for women’s abilities. Supposedly, the only time a midwife can testify in court is regarding paternity when a woman gives birth out of wedlock—but Martha also takes the witness stand in the rape case against a dead man named Joshua Burgess and his living friend Col. Joseph North, whose role as judge in local court proceedings has made the victim, Rebecca Foster, reluctant to make her complaint public. Further complications are numerous: North has control over the Ballard family's lease on their property; Rebecca is carrying the child of one of her rapists; Martha’s son was seen fighting with Joshua Burgess on the day of his death. Lawhon weaves all this into a richly satisfying drama that moves suspensefully between childbed, courtroom, and the banks of the Kennebec River. The undimmed romance between 40-something Martha and her husband, Ephraim, adds a racy flair to the proceedings. Knowing how rare the quality of their relationship is sharpens the intensity of Martha’s gaze as she watches the romantic lives of her grown children unfold. As she did with Nancy Wake in Code Name Hélène (2020), Lawhon creates a stirring portrait of a real-life heroine and, as in all her books, includes an endnote with detailed background.
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780385546874
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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