Songwriter and screenwriter Freirich’s debut novel offers an intriguing look at unique yet interrelated patterns of trauma...
A restaurant shootout disrupts ordinary lives, with extraordinary consequences.
When a gunman opens fire in a small restaurant, he kills two men and sends five of the survivors on a collision course with grief. Dr. Bruce Laraby misses the slaughter by minutes when he stops for coffee on his way to his shift at the emergency room. After the two gunshot victims die on his watch, his self-image as a competent doctor is destroyed; to compensate, he gambles with his wife's health to prove he deserves her love. Meanwhile, Anne Hagen and her high-school friend, Jimmy Jaspersen, form a conspiracy of silence after Anne's father is shot before their eyes. Anne transmutes her loss into religious ecstasy, while her pressure on Jimmy leads him to contemplate suicide. Driving-school owner Charlie Archenault marvels at surviving the shooting with a graze wound; he takes his good luck as a sign that he should gamble his life's savings at the roulette table. Carla Davenport, a struggling single mother and the restaurant's cashier, is so traumatized by the shooting that she neglects her croupy, ailing baby; wrapped in a fantasy that Dr. Laraby will rescue her, she loses her son to the child-welfare system. Against the backdrop of shabby strip malls, fast-food joints and the name-brand trappings that make up the characters’ everyday lives, an otherworldly, transcendent force—possibly the “winged creatures” of the title—guides each of the five survivors through debilitating trauma to healing and redemption. While the episodic shifts of perspective and the ubiquitous product placement shout movie adaptation—confirmed by the book cover, which announces a “major motion picture” in the works—the story builds to a suspenseful climax. The denouncement walks a thin line between happy-ever-after and disaster.
Songwriter and screenwriter Freirich’s debut novel offers an intriguing look at unique yet interrelated patterns of trauma and recovery.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-37895-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
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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