Despite hauntingly beautiful prose, there is a secondhand feel to Esther’s story, which plays fiddle to Jane’s navel-gazing.
Minot (Rapture, 2002, etc.) tries to combine a fictionalized but mostly journalistic account of the abduction of Ugandan children by Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army with a sexual drama about the doomed romance of an American writer and a much younger white Kenyan.
The title refers to the actual girls taken from St. Mary’s Catholic boarding school in northern Uganda in 1996 by Kony’s rebels. The early scenes following the seizure of the young girls are riveting, the attempt of the school’s Italian nun to retrieve them—she wins the release of more than 100 girls while Kony’s men keep the strongest and most attractive for themselves—heartbreaking. The child-army experience is narrated through the eyes of Esther, who, like many of the St. Mary’s girls, eventually manages to escape to a rehab center. Esther’s narrative of her captivity and attempt to recover is intercut with the story of an American writer named Jane who has come to Africa to write about the St. Mary girls. Before traveling to Uganda, Jane stays in Nairobi, where she falls in with a group of expats and white Kenyans who read like Ernest Hemingway retreads: sexual free spirit Lana, her stuffy rich American lover, Don, sexy world-weary photographer Pierre. In her late 30s, Jane finds herself falling in love with Kenyan paraglider Harry, who is maybe 23. The group accompanies Jane to Uganda as a kind of a lark, but the mood sours as the privileged whites face the enormity of the atrocities committed against the kidnapped children, who were turned into murderers and sex slaves and are now struggling to readjust. Eventually, Jane interviews Esther, who tells her story, but even while Jane claims to be deeply moved by Esther’s tragedy, she is obsessing about Harry’s waning interest in their affair. Ultimately, Jane’s drama reaches its own tragic conclusion, proving perhaps that bad stuff can happen anywhere.
Despite hauntingly beautiful prose, there is a secondhand feel to Esther’s story, which plays fiddle to Jane’s navel-gazing.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-307-26638-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
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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