Thoughtful fiction with an unusual political twist on the theme of insiders vs. outsiders.
Libertarians decide to take over the town of Haymaker on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, but the locals have a decidedly different opinion about the wisdom of this move.
The Freedom Congress, a libertarian organization of six members, has been looking for a congenial place to settle where they can put their political philosophy into action. After much study they choose Haymaker for its all-American flavor, its lax zoning laws and what they perceive as a culture amenable to libertarianism. The leader of the group is Gorman Tate, a ponytailed, charismatic figure who tends to stay in the background when they and some sympathetic followers move to Freedom Springs, as they dub their corner of Haymaker. Much more directly involved in Haymaker politics is Josef Novak, a Freedom Congress member who winds up running for mayor. While the local community is scarcely welcoming, there is nevertheless a variety of attitudes toward the newcomers ranging from begrudging respect to utter hostility. The hostility comes from Donnie Sarver, a young man who owns a towing business and whose dislike of the libertarian contingent borders on the xenophobic. Ironically, Haymaker prides itself on its independent past, for it arose from a tumultuous culture of lumbermen, “gamblers, prostitutes, and miscellaneous roughnecks”—each September the town celebrates this past in “Boomtown Days”—but this romanticized history can’t really accommodate what the townspeople perceive as a very real threat to their future.
Thoughtful fiction with an unusual political twist on the theme of insiders vs. outsiders.Pub Date: April 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-87580-719-5
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Switchgrass Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
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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