Giving a sly nod to genre conventions, Durrant ends with a marriage proposal, but this is no fairy tale, and Maggie’s...
British journalist Durrant’s first novel follows a familiar trajectory for high-end romantic fiction, yet it’s a standout for its rich detail and deceptively weightless prose.
While Jake works late at the ad agency, Maggie Owens raises their two boys in a comfortable London suburb (even though Jake and Maggie remain unmarried). The two have lately grown distant, when Maggie bumps into Claire, the golden girl from their schooldays (a popular plot device this season: see Jane Green’s Bookends, p. 515) who is still glamorous and still makes Maggie feel dowdy and boring. Claire’s behavior, in fact, soon convinces Maggie that she’s the reason for Jake’s long hours and frequent business trips, and when Pete, the Aussie gardener, enters her life, Maggie embarks on an affair of her own. Nothing new so far, but Durrant’s wry and precise observation of Maggie’s middle-class milieu—from the sub rosa playground status wars (“nonworking mothers are all obsessed with other people’s help, as if our children’s preoccupation with fairness had rubbed off on us”) and the casual detail perfectly conveyed (a pregnant woman in the shallow end of the pool with her “legs splayed like a Beanie Baby plonked on a nursery shelf”) and on to the nature of long-term relationships (“something with edges was flying around in the air, catching in our hair and jangling our nerves)—makes it all seem like unexplored territory. Except for a car accident that serves as the crisis causing Maggie to see things anew, there are no singular, dramatic ups and downs: Maggie’s world is an accumulation of unremarkable moments, hence with the feel of real life.
Giving a sly nod to genre conventions, Durrant ends with a marriage proposal, but this is no fairy tale, and Maggie’s response, along with all that’s come before, puts this one head and shoulders above most of the “chick-lit” that will flank it on the shelves.Pub Date: June 3, 2002
ISBN: 1-57322-215-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
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.
