An enjoyable escape read, sometimes undermined by frivolous scenes, with contemporary relevance and likable leads.
Fritsch’s unique twist on ancient Greece and early Rome offers more adventures of Timon, last surviving member of Troy’s royal family, and his companion, Lukas.
In Fritsch’s version of the Greek myth, Timon is son of Helen, the Spartan beauty, and Paris, the Trojan prince who brought her to Troy, which precipitated the Trojan War. After Paris was killed and Troy destroyed, Helen married Menelaus. They’ve reigned as king and queen of Sparta for the past 17 years. When they brought baby Timon to Sparta, they placed him in an orphanage to ensure his safety. He grew up with Lukas, his best friend, lover, and musical soul mate. Timon has only recently learned of his royal lineage. Now he and Lukas live together in the palace. Meanwhile, trouble is brewing in the fledging republic of Rome, populated two decades earlier by Trojan escapees. Former Trojan landowner Coriolanus, now commander of the Roman army and navy, sends his 18-year-old son, Marco, to Sparta to invite Timon, whose existence has recently become public, for a visit. In Rome, the three young men establish a ménage à trois, and Fritsch devotes considerable narrative space to their carefree, libidinous romps. Unfortunately, their frolicking, less poignant than the earlier novel’s Timon-Lukas love story, threatens to overwhelm the novel’s more intriguing underpinnings, which deal with political avarice and gender equality, the latter represented by the story’s strongest female character, Thalia, captain of her own merchant ship. Gradually, Timon realizes Coriolanus’ invitation was part of a plan to replace the republic with a monarchy. He intends to seize power during the upcoming senate elections, in which the “plebeians,” who now have the right to vote, have forced the patricians to run against Brutus, the populist hero. Readers will recognize Coriolanus’ scheme to overthrow the popular vote by violence as a haunting reminder of America’s current political climate and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Following the structure of his series opener, Fritsch hands over alternating narration to the three primary characters—Timon, Lukas, and Marco, giving the novel three distinct, engaging voices, although only Marco faces emotionally compelling conflict.
An enjoyable escape read, sometimes undermined by frivolous scenes, with contemporary relevance and likable leads.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2021
ISBN: 979-8985072600
Page Count: 146
Publisher: Asymmetric Worlds
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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
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