An admirable effort, though all parts don’t quite fit together.
A young woman fights against the injustice of slavery and searches for true love during the Civil War.
After disguising herself as a man and fighting alongside the Union army in the first volume of Mach’s trilogy (Sissy!, 2004)–about a host of characters navigating their way through the turmoil of the war–heroine Jessica Radford turns to the power of her pen to help emancipate slaves. While she strives to complete a novel about the difficulties faced by a freed slave whose persona is remarkably similar to her own, Jessica struggles to choose between two suitors: preacher Matt Lightfoot, a slavery advocate despite his fighting for the Union, and Otto Heller, an older widower who has dedicated his life to ending slavery. Jessica’s passionate writing is as much a rebellion against the constraints placed on women in a patriarchal society as it is against slavery, but, as the title suggests, she’s only one piece of the puzzle. The story is told from the shifting perspectives of a host of different characters, including former slave Tinker, southern belle-turned-prostitute Sara Toby and free black Canadian musician Devin Alcott, with cameos by historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman. Mach’s attention to historical detail is impressive, and young-adult readers will undoubtedly appreciate the mixture of vivid battlefield descriptions and unique characters, each with their own compelling backstory. A few anachronisms detract from the authenticity, and there are moments when the dialogue and dialect don’t ring true, such as when historical facts are awkwardly inserted mid-conversation. The constantly changing perspectives, while a well-chosen vehicle for the large ensemble cast, often switch at a dizzying pace, creating a perplexing mix of insightful moments and abrupt shifts that disrupt the narrative flow.
An admirable effort, though all parts don’t quite fit together.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2006
ISBN: 0-9745159-4-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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