There’s a relentless quality to the novel, and it can almost seem too grim, especially at the end. But there are saving...
Set in Dust Bowl Oklahoma in the early 1930s, this is the harrowing story of a farm family struggling to survive a seemingly endless drought and the privations it brings.
Drawing her title from a verse in Deuteronomy, author Meadows (Mercy Train, 2012) focuses on the Bell family, Annie and Samuel, who have migrated from Kansas in search of a better life, and their children Birdie and Fred. The book begins slowly, as the author introduces her resolute characters, who are trying to maintain some semblance of a normal life, and describes, in vivid detail, the parched, unforgiving landscape where dust storms destroy fields and crops. Then the pace picks up: Birdie, a headstrong 15-year-old, has been carrying on with Cy, the son of a local farmer; now Annie, a devoted farm wife who hasn’t completely lost her youthful spark, is tempted by the advances of the slick town mayor. Dreamy 8-year-old Fred, who doesn’t speak, communicating via a small chalkboard he carries with him, develops a lung ailment, and the God-fearing Samuel, perhaps the most overwhelmed member of the family, starts building a boat—convinced, somehow, that flooding rains are on the way and he will need to shelter his family with his own version of Noah’s Ark. The writing is richly evocative throughout, precise in its depiction of the harsh natural world and tender in its renderings of the complicated emotional lives of the main characters. The author has an abundance of feeling for the Bells, and the reader comes to care deeply about them as they deal with unimaginable loss.
There’s a relentless quality to the novel, and it can almost seem too grim, especially at the end. But there are saving graces in the form of powerful writing and memorable characters who are hard to shake off even after you’ve read the last page.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62779-426-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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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