Justice, southern style, is the all-too-elusive goal in veteran columnist Wicker's tale of race, sex, and murder. When Jace Allman checks into his job as Stonewall County's daytime jailer, he finds nighttime jailer Ben Neely's Fairlane missing. That's because Easter Lilly Odum, awaiting trial for stealing a utility truck, has escaped from her cell and taken off with the car, having first stabbed Ben to death with his own Swiss Army knife. The locals laugh at the defense Easter Lilly offers when's she's capturedthat Ben was threatening her at knifepoint with rape. They know that Easter's jailbait past (even her grade-school teacher had to leave town to keep out of prison) makes her the world's least likely rape victim, and that Ben's brother Tyree, the county prosecutor, will call in every favor to pack and convince a receptive jury. What they don't know is that Easter's about to get some unexpected help from a white knight: W. Shepherd Riley, a dormant civil-rights lawyer who's been hibernating in Vermont till he reads about the case, charges back down south, and sweet-talks Meg McKinnon, his former partner and lover, into joining him. From here on in everything gets more complicatedShep and Meg promptly fall back into each other's arms; Shep realizes he'd like to do the same (and much, much more) with the client he's stolen away from a sozzled local defender; and the opposing attorney's prove each the other's equal in shameless courtroom posturing and underhanded legal maneuveringeven though, as in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Wicker's obvious model, there's less doubt about the facts of the case than about what those facts mean. An evocative parade of adulteries, betrayals, luncheonette meals, and slugs of Wild Turkey that doesn't produce many legal thrillsor, ultimately, the kind of moral complexity Wicker (Donovan's Wife, 1992; Tragic Failure: Racial Integration in America, 1996, etc.) would like to claim.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-688-10628-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1998
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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