Well-wrought but painfully heartfelt: Hellenga’s (The Fall of a Sparrow, 1998, etc.) story creeps at a snail’s pace to a...
An amiable if long-winded coming-of-ager set amid the quiet turmoil of 1960s rural Michigan.
Appleton is too far from New England to invite comparisons to Norman Rockwell, but it brings Andrew Wyeth to mind: Bleak, open countryside alternating with sparsely settled towns full of weather-beaten Dutch Reformed churches. Martin Dijksterhuis grew up in Appleton, on the orchard that had been in his family for generations, but he’s the son of an unusual household. His intellectual mother (a University of Chicago grad) speaks Latin and French with her son at home and drives him 40 miles to see The Fountainhead and the other highbrow movies that never make it to the hinterlands. Martin is an apt pupil but not sure he wants to follow his mother’s footsteps. For one thing, he’s in love with Cory Williams, the black daughter of the orchard foreman, and in the summer before his freshman year at the University of Chicago he discovers that Cory is pregnant. He wants to marry her and start a family, but she and her family suddenly leave town—and Martin finds out that his father paid them to go. He gives up on college, joins the Navy, later takes a job with the railroad in an attempt to forget her. The one thing that sustains him is his love of blues guitar, and he spends all his spare time tracking down old musicians and looking up arrangements of their work. He compiles an anthology of the music but lacks the confidence to go on stage himself. When he finally gets some advice from a preacher/bluesman about trusting in his own abilities, he faces up to his desire to be both a musician and a father.
Well-wrought but painfully heartfelt: Hellenga’s (The Fall of a Sparrow, 1998, etc.) story creeps at a snail’s pace to a conclusion obvious to most readers long before.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-2533-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
