With so many questions left unanswered, this dystopia is ripe for a sequel.
Growing up among privileged doomsday preppers, Marlo has always known that the end of the world was nigh. But she never suspected trouble from within her community.
Climate change, poisoned soil, rising sea levels—the harbingers of ecological collapse prompted Marlo, her adoptive parents, and a group of wealthy, like-minded survivalists to settle a secluded community in the wilds of Oregon. Adopted at 14 months old, Marlo has grown up on the ranch, with only occasional visits to the outside world, a place known as the Disaster among the ranchers. Now 25, Marlo has few friends left now that Alex and Ben have moved out. With sporadic access to the internet, Marlo doesn't get many updates from them about their adventures in eco-activism. But the sleepy wait for an apocalypse abruptly ends when five bald eagles are discovered dead on the ranch with no clear cause of death. Curious about life in the Disaster and restless to participate in the fight against climate change, Marlo makes plans to temporarily leave the ranch. But her overprotective, smothering parents have other ideas. Serendipitously, a mysterious stranger arrives at the ranch. His name is Wolf, and he may be the answer to at least some of Marlo's prayers, as they quickly connect and fall in love. In this, her debut novel, Sloley masterfully weaves together the tropes of dystopia, romance, and mystery. Suspicions and questions abound: Is Wolf too good to be true? Who is posting ominous religious quotations around the community? Who hid the mysterious gun cache? Yet as alarming events compound, the rising sense of menace is undercut by Marlo’s naiveté. Her sheltered life and overdependence on her parents prevent her from seeing the dangers that the reader sees at every corner.
With so many questions left unanswered, this dystopia is ripe for a sequel.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-0406-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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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