O’Malley manages to take some of the ugliest aspects of human existence and, through the magic of his words, infuse them...
O’Malley (In the Province of Saints, 2005) crafts a sensitive portrait of lost souls who desperately try to reconcile their pasts with their current realities.
Duncan Bright is 10 years old in December 1980 and living in a northern Minnesota monastery with other orphans. He has no memory of the first years of his life, but kind Brother Canice, who constantly chews sunflower seeds, provides him with a story, which becomes Duncan’s mantra: Ten years earlier, the Festival of Lights Holiday Train became stranded in the midst of a terrible snowstorm. Many people in the area froze to death, including those on the snowbound train. Early in the morning, Duncan’s mother appeared outside the Blessed House of the Gray Brothers of Mercy and left him on the flagstone, then disappeared. She continues to inquire about him and loves him, but she feels he’s better off at the Home because she can’t take care of him. Duncan, who claims to remember his birth and the voice of God speaking to him, desperately dreams that one day his mother will come and reclaim him. He prizes an old transistor radio, given to him by Brother Canice, and he listens to recordings of the Apollo 11 astronauts at night—voices of men Duncan believes were doomed to never return to Earth. When his mother finally comes, she takes Duncan to San Francisco, where they live a bleak existence. Maggie Bright’s a former opera sensation who’s now a burned-out alcoholic who sings in a bar. Her boyfriend, Joshua, is a Vietnam vet, but the three scarred individuals draw comfort and a tenuous strength from one another. Haunting and dark, O’Malley’s narrative is profoundly moving. His characters bear the wounds of their imperfections, but no matter how hard they struggle to change direction, to reinterpret the past, the reality remains: They cannot heal themselves or each other.
O’Malley manages to take some of the ugliest aspects of human existence and, through the magic of his words, infuse them with beauty and light.Pub Date: March 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60819-279-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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