Readers up to the challenge may enjoy puzzling through Wright’s intricate, imperfectly explained mythology, while others may...
A severely damaged girl embodies the soul of the Australian continent in Wright’s searing dystopian novel.
Wright (Carpenteria, 2010, etc.) plunges the reader directly into the chaotic world of the lost Aboriginal teen her eccentric rescuer names Oblivia Ethelyne. Rendered mute by the traumatic experience of a gang rape, Oblivia is hiding in the “deep underground bowel of a giant eucalyptus tree” when old Bella Donna, herself an escapee from a northern Europe now devastated by climate change, finds her and takes her to live in an abandoned ship floating on a polluted swamp inside a detention camp for Aboriginals. Here the heroine makes friends with the black swans of the swamp before she is taken away by brutal “boy genius” Warren Finch, who is about to become “the head of state of a dilapidated country in a dilapidated world.” After a grueling journey across the desert to a “skewed dream of a city” in southern Australia, Warren locks up his new bride like a princess in a castle while he travels around with a look-alike “television wife,” leaving Oblivia to consort with ghosts, rats, and a lice-ridden old snow monkey while she does her best to liberate the swans that have faithfully stuck with her and bring them home. In this nearly dialogue-free novel, the author pays little attention to character development, instead creating an impressionistic vision of a near future where humanity has nearly destroyed the natural world. While the relatively simple story could be told more concisely, and Wright’s use of language can be more exuberant than precise, Oblivia’s epic journey provides a strong thread to draw the reader through a sometimes-cluttered verbal landscape.
Readers up to the challenge may enjoy puzzling through Wright’s intricate, imperfectly explained mythology, while others may find the narrative obstacles thrown up along the way too much bother.Pub Date: June 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2478-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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