Unremarkable, though fans of Ann Packer and Jodi Picoult may appreciate Johnson’s careful foray into post-crisis fiction.
Well-written but formulaic debut explores a family’s grief after a tragic accident.
Intellectually engaged, financially blessed, possessed of good values and better luck, the attractive McMartins have never known real heartbreak until, on an otherwise unmemorable morning, 16-year-old Helen sets off to break ties with Bobby, her secret older boyfriend. With four beers in his belly and a gas tank full of sugar (courtesy of a jealous ex-girlfriend), Bobby crashes his motorcycle into the car of reluctant celebrity Harry Harlow, host of a famous game show, Would You Rather? Bobby dies instantly, and Helen is in a coma. Her father Darius, an esoteric English professor with a photographic memory, holds vigil at her beside, refusing to give up hope for her recovery. Mother Sophia, an arts administrator racked with guilt over her blindness to the signs of Helen’s ill-fated romance, becomes obsessed with Bobby, especially after detectives suggest that he had criminal ties. Elder daughter Miranda, a freshman in college, allows herself for the first time to be drawn into a relationship with a man, someone she met on the day of Helen’s accident. Meanwhile, though he was not at fault in the accident, Harry finds that he can’t let go of his guilt. He begins acting erratically, is fired from the game show, divorces his young wife, pursues a tentative friendship with Sophia and launches a bizarre business venture. As it becomes increasingly apparent that Helen will never recover, family members flee to their separate spaces. Miranda follows her man to Alaska’s remote backcountry; Darius insists on moving Helen home to care for her himself; and Sophia, sensing a crumbling marriage, moves to New York City. The final bleak development is anticlimactic, given how many lives have already been irrevocably altered.
Unremarkable, though fans of Ann Packer and Jodi Picoult may appreciate Johnson’s careful foray into post-crisis fiction.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15452-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
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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