A multilayered thriller that tackles issues of race and history in America, but comes up short of a fully nuanced...
A present-day racist incident launches a search for answers about a 1907 lynching in the new novel by Morris (Cologne No. 10 for Men, 2007).
When racist graffiti defiles a highway near Ron Watkins’ new home in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, he remembers his mother’s warnings. Maryland was a slave state, she taught him, and the local white population has never forgotten its former violent dominance of blacks. Watkins has moved his family back to the East Coast from California in order to further his career and he has felt safe, if slightly conflicted, in his largely black neighborhood. But even as his neighbors—including one new white friend—chew over the vagaries of race and social issues, the past rears its head. Watkins’ great-grandfather was murdered by a lynch mob, he learns, and his family was forced to sell its farm on the very land where Watkins’ prosperous suburb now stands. Now Watkins wants to learn the truth and clear his great-grandfather’s name. However, the past lives for others, too: the local neo-Nazi group responsible for the hateful graffiti has plans for action—aimed directly at the Watkins and their new friends. Morris links the past and present stories through historical documents, half-remembered family lore and one very important letter, building up to parallel climaxes of danger and resolution. He has cast a wide range of characters with great awareness, from the more radical and angry blacks to those who observe no race divide in their personal matters, and from historically sensitive white people to their subtly prejudiced counterparts, focusing heavily on such details as skin and hair. The villains, however, lack the same fullness of character. While it is difficult to imagine much scope or intelligence among the racist characters, their one-dimensional portrayals—all hateful stupidity—weakens this otherwise sensitive study of race and history in the American South.
A multilayered thriller that tackles issues of race and history in America, but comes up short of a fully nuanced examination.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1450203906
Page Count: 288
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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