A lovely collection of stories that rewards subsequent readings.
Jamaican immigrant and return-migration stories told with unsentimental honesty.
Eleven short stories examine the immigrant experience through the prism of place, food, gender, and generations; in this collection, the home lands are Jamaica—where the author spent her childhood—and the United States. Far from pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstrap mythology, and thankfully devoid of violin-swelling nostalgia, these stories unravel the knot of being in a place but not quite belonging and the sense of missing but not quite understanding what was lost. In “Bad Behavior” (winner of the Paris Review's Plimpton Prize for Fiction), what could have been written as a contest of wills turns out instead to be an examination of three generations of women in a Jamaican family. The “bad behavior” belongs to the youngest, 14-year-old Stacy, who was caught giving a boy a blow job in school. Delivering Stacy to her granny Trudy in Jamaica, Pam, the girl’s frantic mother, hopes Trudy will love her granddaughter "enough to show her some of the harshness that the world was ready and able to give her.” In reality, Stacy, like her mother and grandmother before her, has already experienced several harsh realities. In “Mermaid River,” a mother leaves her son with his grandmother while she settles in the U.S. This story artfully swings back and forth between the boy’s childhood in Jamaica to the time when he finally rejoins his mother and her husband as a young teen in Brooklyn. Other stories feature young adults, long detached from but not quite severed from their Jamaican roots, with various levels of self-awareness. “Only now does the history of that river sit on me,” says the narrator of “Mermaid River.” The same can be said of this strong debut collection, which beckons the reader back, again and again.
A lovely collection of stories that rewards subsequent readings.Pub Date: July 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-9920-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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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