Can-I-get-a-witness enthusiasm can’t compensate for a nearly nonexistent story. From the author of similar tales (The Hand I...
Three generations of small-town black women, aided by lovable ghosts.
Lily Paine Pines drives around Mulberry, Georgia, looking for LaShawndra, her wayward granddaughter, when the wispy, wrinkled apparition of a much-loved local teacher, Miss Grace Moses, appears in the seat beside her, offering sage counsel and companionship during the long night. Miss Moses listens patiently as Lily reminisces about her own childhood and teaching career—and about her failed marriage to Charles, a compulsive gambler who doted on their only daughter, Sandra. Did he spoil her? As a teenager, Sandra got pregnant but never paid much attention to her daughter, much to Lily’s dismay. Now, Sandra, who sells real estate, is involved in a romantic relationship with a preacher and is generally obsessed with respectability and material things. Luckily, she’s showing houses to another wise ghost, Nurse Joanna Bloom, once a midwife at the local colored hospital. Joanna is a stalwart spirit in starched white who teaches cynical Sandra a thing or two about hope. Sandra finds out that Joanna aborted her own illegitimate baby decades ago—and made up for it by bringing generations of babies into the world. Shift to LaShawndra, a hootchie-mama of 19 who favors microskirts and tube tops. She’s got a reputation as a ho (she isn’t) and is always ready to hook up with any good-for-nothing who struts by; now, she’s hitching to Freaknik, a wild spring-break party for black college students, when a phat phantom in a shiny black Jag pulls over. Why, it’s Liza Jane, the glamorous, tough-talking former owner of a juke joint. LaShawndra can’t tell if Liza Jane is real or not, but her car sure is. The two head down the road, and LaShawndra finds out that the good times can kill her if she’s not careful. And so on.
Can-I-get-a-witness enthusiasm can’t compensate for a nearly nonexistent story. From the author of similar tales (The Hand I Fan With, 1996, etc.).Pub Date: April 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-019779-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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