And yet: neurotically charming and funny, the adopted single dad still wins our sympathy.
The prolific science-fiction and YA author takes a respite from Dingillian family strife (Bouncing Off the Moon, 2001) with a hasty, jokey, and very personal account of a middle-aged gay man’s adoption of a high-risk eight-year-old boy.
Chatty and given to cornball humor and fits of sudden weeping, Northridge, California, resident Gerrold recounts his attempts to adopt a child alone—from feeling unnerved that he himself is regarded as second-rate as a potential parent to the daunting afflictions—hyperactivity, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome—that most of the “special-needs” children come saddled with. Dennis is the boy David chooses, mostly because he’s the only white child available and the county doesn’t promote cross-racial matchups, but also because Gerrold has a “feeling.” Although the boy is deemed unable to form a lasting attachment (read: is unadoptable), Gerrold wants him and proceeds to examine minutely why he shouldn’t have him, which the reader never stops wondering either. Is it selfish vanity on Gerrold’s part, or is it just that no one else wants the child and Gerrold won’t let him down? Once united, the two get along swimmingly, and the story becomes a happy snapshot of David’s enchantment with their routine together—until Dennis reasserts the notion that he’s been planted by Martians, leaving Gerrold to wonder whether it could be true and how he ought to investigate. An earthquake and the death of the family dog unsettle Dennis and provoke him to act out, testing his new daddy’s limits and patience. Throughout, meanwhile, The Martian Child reads like a fast-written magazine article with lots of quotes and one-sentence paragraphs, and the fact that Gerrold is a writer constructing a narrative is reaffirmed constantly, with the result that the reader can’t shed the uncomfortable notion that Dennis is being manipulated as fodder for a good story.
And yet: neurotically charming and funny, the adopted single dad still wins our sympathy.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-765-30311-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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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