A well-written but predictable novel with unfulfilled New-Age potential.
A family at a crossroads reconfigures itself in Warner’s (English/University of New Mexico) second novel (Deep in the Heart, 2001, etc.).
51-year-old Peggy Granger is an ex-hippie who used to read tarot cards in exchange for food, shelter and pocket money. Her cards have been stored away, untouched for years, until her 16-year-old daughter, Sophie, finds them and asks her to do a reading. Ten cards, laid out in the form of a Celtic cross, provide the titles and openings of each chapter, a clever narrative structure that links the past, present and future of this family whose stability is as fragile as a house of cards. The cards reveal their present crisis—Sophie is pregnant and has been keeping this secret for weeks—but that isn’t the only problem befalling the Granger family. Peggy’s boutique in Albuquerque’s Old Town is failing, her husband, Jack, has shut down their sex life after a recent heart attack, and their 12-year-old son, Ian, is being bullied at school, mostly by “Hispanic boys who have taken a dislike to him on account of his towhead and ivory complexion.” To make matters worse, as Sophie delays making any decisions about her pregnancy, a visitor from Peggy’s past insinuates herself into the family in more ways than one. Despite their importance to the structure of the book, the tarot cards don’t show up much in the actual story, a shame because the descriptions of the symbolic meanings of the cards are interesting in ways that these characters are not. The cards require a longer gaze to really understand them, but Warner abandons the subtext of the cards, instead relying on the obvious tropes of a teenage pregnancy drama—a girl “recklessly in favor of her own happiness” forced to make unselfish choices, her family coming to terms with her decisions as they evaluate their own lives, and a stranger who turns up with an offer that makes it all so much easier than it should be.
Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8263-3077-2
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Univ. of New Mexico
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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
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