Well-written though oft-told, and interrupted much too often by a confused spirituality.
Jan Campbell is an excellent student and devoted churchgoer—until she scandalizes the Baptist congregation by saying “nobody should hold a child back from God. . . .”
Aunt Ada agrees in principle, though she’s never uttered more than a quiet amen in church. Jan loves to listen to Ada’s stories of life in rural Mississippi, before the family migrated to the mostly black Chicago suburb they live in now. Her father Charles, a plainspoken dirt farmer down south, isn’t quite good enough for her mother Jessie, who used to work as a hired glamour girl, distracting the marks in a cardsharp’s traveling game. None of this makes much sense to Jan, who listens for answers in the bittersweet lyrics of jazz singers and grows up wondering about the mysteries of life—and love. Her first lover is Don Obatunde, who grew up in the projects with his heroin-addict mother, turned to crime at a young age, and became a sculptor in jail. Upon his release, wealthy white women helped get his work into galleries and shows, and Don showed his thanks by bedding them all. When Jan discovers that he’s involved with another woman, she thinks how nice it would be if she could commune with the family spirits. Her long-dead grandmother Hannah is waiting, but Jan can’t hear her words of advice (yet). Though Hannah’s “earth time” is over, her spirit moves freely between this world and the Hereafter, offering wise counsel in a woo-woo language that doesn’t sound like anything from Mississippi (it’s noted that Hannah is part Cherokee, as if to explain the cryptic comments). Eventually, Jan lands a great job at a jazz station, and, having gotten a new love, responsible Phil, figures out that the voice she hears in her head doesn’t mean she’s crazy—just communing with family ghosts.
Well-written though oft-told, and interrupted much too often by a confused spirituality.Pub Date: March 19, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-75809-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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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