Those unfamiliar with football will be heartened to learn that the game’s moves, strategy, and terminology are explained...
This sports-hero entertainment conjures up a woman who can play professional football in a book that isn’t overly serious about such social issues.
While vacationing on a Belize beach, Washington Redskins offensive coordinator Skip Granger spots Jesse Smoke throwing a football better than most NFL quarterbacks. She’s 6 feet 2 inches tall and weighs about 180, with a lithe boyish build and freckles that Skip, the book’s semismitten narrator, will mention frequently, along with her blue eyes, curly hair, and sweet smile. Impressed but initially only mulling a practical joke at a Redskins tryout camp, Skip gets serious about signing Jesse as a quarterback after seeing her in a women’s pro game. Then Jesse also reveals that she can kick field goals with 100 percent accuracy from 50 yards. As she begins to set the team on course for the Super Bowl, the genre demands major obstacles, which here include: transgender rumors; the reappearance of a bad mom; weird nosebleeds; a missing birth certificate; and legal action by the players’ union, hoping to oust the lady and preserve the game’s integrity (no laughing, please). Bausch may be best known for the novel that became the movie Bruce Almighty. He’s also the twin brother of another fiction writer, Richard Bausch. In his eighth novel, Robert frames the narrative as a book written by Skip years after the events. This allows the coach to expose his weakness for sledgehammer foreshadowing at the end of some chapters, for instance: “And thus began the brief, heartbreaking career that became the legend of Jesse Smoke.” Bausch clearly is having fun—awkwardly so at times—with what is largely a teen genre aside from exceptions like Malamud’s brilliant The Natural. He even tosses in a Shroud of Turin reference (Jesse = Jesus?). There’s more football here than a nonfan might enjoy, but Jesse is impressive, the play-by-play is well-done, and the plot twists are less ham-handed than they seem at first.
Those unfamiliar with football will be heartened to learn that the game’s moves, strategy, and terminology are explained well enough that they'll be able to appreciate just how thoroughly la femme here kicks male derrière.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63286-397-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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 masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.
An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).
Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.Pub Date: April 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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