Well-crafted characters struggling alone with shared grief furnishes a coursing river on which this intriguing story...
Pelletier’s (Accidents of Providence, 2012) second novel unfolds a complex story in the span of 24 hours—the dreaded yet celebrated anniversary of Henry and Marilyn Plageman’s son Jack’s birth...and death.
Dead 14 years on May 22, 1897, Jack would have been 16 if he had lived. Traditionally, on the morning of May 22, Lucy, Henry’s lover of 10 years, helps him plant new flowers at Jack’s gravesite and then leaves before unsuspecting Marilyn arrives to mourn. This particular day, the normally well-orchestrated schedule collapses, soon to be followed by the tenuous relationships that have been precipitated by grief. Pelletier expertly fills in the back story—introspection and memories mingle smoothly with the present. Henry, Marilyn, and Lucy relate their stories in the second person, a point of view that serves to distance them from their own lives, as if they are not living but merely being observed. Henry once had a life with a warm, loving wife and beloved son...until that sunlit afternoon when Jack was napping and he and Marilyn made love. Marilyn can no longer bear intimacy with Henry. Her life was once filled to the brim with love...until loss and guilt stepped in. Lucy met a broken Henry and fell in love. She thought he might leave Marilyn, not understanding that he was inextricably bound to her...until she saw them together at the cemetery. Blue, Henry and Lucy’s 8-year-old daughter, loves her absentee father deeply, but her impulsive action in the cemetery on this calamitous Saturday brings relationships to a wrenching conclusion. In the end, the half wives may be able to redeem their lives, but it remains to be seen if Henry will stay locked in his own half-life.
Well-crafted characters struggling alone with shared grief furnishes a coursing river on which this intriguing story effortlessly flows. Tough to put down.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-547-49116-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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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