Like Hyde’s bestselling Pay It Forward, this novel casts light into the dark recesses of human emotions, offering the...
As he's hunting a magnificent buck, cattle rancher Aiden Delacorte’s bullet pierces the animal’s heart. At the same time, Aiden falls to the ground in excruciating pain.
Aiden has a problem: he suddenly discovers a radical empathy for animals. Worse, his gift seems to have been there, lying dormant, since his traumatized childhood. Unable to endure his cattle’s fear and pain, Aiden makes a mess of the annual roundup. After his fears get him thrown from his horse and his reluctance to hog-tie a pig for gelding gets him two broken ribs, Aiden is essentially shunned by his small community. Even his girlfriend, Livie, dumps him for a more rugged ranch hand. Luckily, a single mother named Gwen has moved to town and caught Aiden’s eye. As their romance progresses, Aiden meets Gwen’s charming daughter, Elizabeth, and her troubled son, Milo, who stirs up trouble wherever he goes. When Milo threatens rabbits and a stray dog Aiden adopted, he pushes even Aiden to the brink of violence. Determined to discover the source of his empathy, as well as his difficulties with Milo, Aiden enters therapy. Working with Dr. Hannah Rutledge, Aiden delves into the shadows of his murky childhood to face his demons and help Milo find the light. Hyde (Allie and Bea, 2017, etc.) crafts a compelling read, a story that transcends its potential clichés and sentimentality through characters whose tribulations ring true. Although Milo’s troubles, like Aiden’s gift of empathy, are extreme, they highlight Gwen’s all-too-necessary escape from a violent marriage and Elizabeth’s all-too-common need to please the adults around her.
Like Hyde’s bestselling Pay It Forward, this novel casts light into the dark recesses of human emotions, offering the welcome balm of romance.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5420-4795-1
Page Count: 362
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
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 raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.
A young man writes a letter to his illiterate mother in an attempt to make sense of his traumatic beginnings.
When Little Dog is a child growing up in Hartford, he is asked to make a family tree. Where other children draw full green branches full of relatives, Little Dog’s branches are bare, with just five names. Born in Vietnam, Little Dog now lives with his abusive—and abused—mother and his schizophrenic grandmother. The Vietnam War casts a long shadow on his life: His mother is the child of an anonymous American soldier—his grandmother survived as a sex worker during the conflict. Without siblings, without a father, Little Dog’s loneliness is exacerbated by his otherness: He is small, poor, Asian, and queer. Much of the novel recounts his first love affair as a teen, with a “redneck” from the white part of town, as he confesses to his mother how this doomed relationship is akin to his violent childhood. In telling the stories of those who exist in the margins, Little Dog says, “I never wanted to build a ‘body of work,’ but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work.” Vuong has written one of the most lauded poetry debuts in recent memory (Night Sky with Exit Wounds, 2016), and his first foray into fiction is poetic in the deepest sense—not merely on the level of language, but in its structure and its intelligence, moving associationally from memory to memory, quoting Barthes, then rapper 50 Cent. The result is an uncategorizable hybrid of what reads like memoir, bildungsroman, and book-length poem. More important than labels, though, is the novel’s earnest and open-hearted belief in the necessity of stories and language for our survival.
A raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-56202-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
