Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Ī young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up-sorry, can't tell you how it ends! Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells. 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. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past witchcraft. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section.
She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. 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. 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. 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. This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. Īs Stacy writes of her own journal: “Nothing holy or profound found its way into those pages.”Ī retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch. The police get involved, Matt disappears, and bodies appear. Eventually, Stacy follows Rikki to college, where she “drew to fornication like Texans to a barbecue.” Flash forward to Matt’s reappearance: he and Rikki are far from an All-American couple of any kind, and what happened to helping with the storms? Stacy’s hot for Matt, too! Before long, Matt’s a cheater like Daddy, trying to have Ricky committed. When Daddy dies-he was a cheater, don’t you know-Rikki is convinced it’s because she abandoned God.
Other attempts at righting things include exorcism and rebaptism. As a result of it, Daddy decides to come home twice a week before midnight, and Mommy finally includes all the food groups in meals. Black.” Stacy can’t follow her sister everywhere, so how can she protect her from the storms? Somehow, though, there’s plenty of time for the two to fight over boyfriends and lose their virginity-and it’s a breakup with a boyfriend that triggers Rikki’s first suicide attempt. But Rikki is really the more striking of the two, and she’s frequented by “rich, vanilla, Mayflower white,” but that’s okay, because Rikki is “Black, but not too. When Stacy’s parents punish her, they forbid her to read (maybe not a bad idea, given her library), and anyway the most important thing to Stacy is that people look at her when she walks through the quad at school. Flashback to childhood, when Stacy is more preoccupied with Frogger and Asteroids than her role as guardian angel. Fortunately, Rikki’s sister Stacy (newcomer Hall’s narrator) was charged long ago with protecting her sister. Two African-American sisters plow their way through something approximating life.Īt first, it seems that Rikki and Matt are the “All-American African-American Couple.” But Rikki has storms in her head.
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