Well-written but cloying: you can almost hear the violins swelling at the end of each chapter.
An antipodean tearjerker from Moran (Water, Carry Me, 2000, etc.), this time in the story of a Vietnam vet who messes up his life early on and never seems able to get it straightened out.
Americans were not the only ones traumatized by the war in Vietnam: Harry Hull, born and bred in a suburb if Sydney, was pretty badly torn up by his tour of duty there. A juvenile delinquent after his mother died, Harry joined the army as part of a plea-bargain that kept him out of jail. Most of his time in Southeast Asia was uneventful, but he was laid low one night by a Viet Cong shell. Back home, he took a job as a reporter for the Sydney Herald and there fell in love with a colleague, the lovely Lucy Whitmoor. By this time, Harry had made peace with his father Joe, who retreated into a grief-stricken, alcoholic haze after his wife died. A good thing, too, since Joe soon suffers a stroke and has to be nursed through his final illness by his son. In the meantime, Harry and Lucy go through a rough patch themselves: Lucy' reveals that she’s pregnant and refuses to marry Harry when he offers “to do the right thing.” Dumbfounded by her rejection and alone in the world after the death of his father, Harry turns to his Italian neighbor Bert for advice: “One thing is for sure, the women don't think like us. You wait too long, I believe maybe Lucy would see you in hell before she come back to you.” Bert’s wrong, and Harry does see Lucy again. But the story she tells him of her pregnancy is not what he was prepared for—and adds a final dollop of despair to his hopelessness.
Well-written but cloying: you can almost hear the violins swelling at the end of each chapter.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2002
ISBN: 1-57322-224-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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.
