Surprisingly rich and nuanced for a gangster story: a fine exposition of a hellish and utterly fascinating world, narrated...
Ojikutu’s prizewinning debut depicts a small-time hoodlum’s rise to power and fall from grace.
The South Side of Chicago can make crime look like a good career choice. Mookie and his best friend JC, high-school dropouts both, don’t have many options before them, so when they accidentally become accessories in a mob slaying, they know enough to make a virtue of necessity and sign up with the gang. At first it looks like a great deal for everyone involved: Mookie and JC get their first real taste of money and power, and their bosses, Salvie Fuoco and Tommy Ricci, get a couple of reliable enforcers in the (to them) foreign territory of the black South Side. Most of the early work is small-time stuff—running numbers, collecting on bad debts, etc.—but before long JC and Mookie are important underworld figures in the neighborhood and significant forces in their own right. Tensions begin to emerge between them, however, as Mookie soon becomes the dominant partner and JC finds himself more and more relegated to the status of bagman running Mookie’s errands. When JC is arrested for a murder that he and Mookie committed together, Mookie deftly steps aside and lets his friend take the rap. Convicted and sentenced, JC spends the next 15 years in jail plotting his revenge. By the time he’s paroled, though, Mookie has become even more of a power and controls pretty much the whole South Side. Getting back at him isn’t going to be easy—or pretty—but by now JC has given up all pretense of being a nice guy. The South Side was never a quiet place, but it’s about to erupt now in a way no one has ever imagined.
Surprisingly rich and nuanced for a gangster story: a fine exposition of a hellish and utterly fascinating world, narrated in a colloquial style both vivid and credible.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-609-80847-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Three Rivers/Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
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
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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