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. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. 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. In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II. Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters. 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. (Literary Guild featured alternate and Doubleday Book Club author tour)Ī retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch. Heartfelt but too message-driven'and thus uncompelling'to bring out the Kleenex. More tragedy awaits him, but once more he survives it, buoyed by Uncle Billie’s message'that keeping the light of love bright makes life endurable'a message that, in turn, will later sustain Kathleen. The younger man keeps up Billie’s logbook and now tells Kathleen that it contains a legacy, 'the secret to ageless contentment and ageless love.' Peter tells his own story, how he married Anna before setting off to fight, survived the war though losing his best buddies, and came back to the lighthouse to visit with Anna and their infant daughter Kathleen. In the early 1930s, he’s joined by young Peter, the only survivor of a fiery car crash that killed all of Peter’s family. But both Katie and child died in the postwar influenza epidemic, and a grieving Billie returned to America, where he found solace minding the lighthouse. Accompanied by his only daughter, Kathleen, Peter tells how Uncle Billie immigrated to America, married Katie, served in the merchant Navy in WWI, and, having saved his money, returned to Ireland with Katie and their only child. The lighthouse has served not only as a warning to ships but as a metaphorical beacon of hope for men who have found consolation either working the light, as Uncle Billie did, or visiting it later, like Peter. Ranging in place from Ireland to wartime Italy and an island near Nantucket, the story of Billie O' Banyon and his nephew Peter is told in flashbacks as the dying Peter visits Port Hope lighthouse for the last time. Best-selling Pratt’s second is sweetly sincere but less affecting than his first (The Last Valentine, 1998) in detailing two generations of Irish-American men learning to endure loss.
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