Exalts logistics over logic.
The lives of a 1930s circus performer and a 1950s runaway daughter intersect at an upstate New York horse farm.
Wiseman’s (Coal River, 2015, etc.) fourth novel opens in 1931, as Lilly Blackwood gazes out at her family's horse farm from a window in the attic she is never allowed to leave. Her hyperreligious mother views Lilly as a monster and a punishment for some undefined sin. Her father visits her and has given her a pet cat, but he does nothing to liberate her. We learn the nature of Lilly’s deformity—albinism—when, on her 10th birthday, her mother, in her father’s absence, sells her to Barlow Brothers’ Circus. Lilly grows up among the sideshow freaks, exhibited first as the Ice Princess from Another Planetand later as The Albino Medium. Her enslavement is brutally enforced by Merrick, the embittered sideshow manager. Fortunately, Lilly’s unusual affinity for animals endears her to Cole, Barlow’s elephant trainer, and she advances to the circus proper as an elephant rider. She marries Cole and becomes pregnant. In the alternating '50s chapters, Julia, now 18, fled Blackwood Manor horse farm at 15 to escape her dysfunctional mother, clearly also Lilly’s mother. A hardscrabble three years among the working poor ends when her mother dies and Julia inherits Blackwood. (Her father, also clearly Lilly’s father, is already dead.) Julia’s story is primarily a quest to understand her parents’ failure to provide “unconditional love.” As Blackwood's new owner, Julia adopts horse-friendly policies, such as allowing foals to be nursed by their own mothers. In an apparent authorial ploy to build suspense, an inordinate number of pages are taken up with Julia’s meticulous search of Blackwood Manor’s many musty rooms and their mustier contents. But readers will have long figured out the answers to Julia’s main query: is that albino in circus garb, pictured in those old newspaper clippings, related to her, and if so, how? Too much effort is expended on set dressing in both narratives and not enough on crafting a convincing back story to explain the parents’ criminal behavior.
Exalts logistics over logic.Pub Date: July 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61773-449-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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
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
© Copyright 2025 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.
