Spry debut from a writer who’s got the skills but needs to set her sights on bigger things.
A fiercely independent Chicana lesbian navigates the pleasures and perils (mostly the latter) of the Los Angeles dating scene.
Leticia Torrez pulls free of her overbearing Nana and her own diffident quietude and tries to spread her wings. Unapologetically gay—little in the way here of tearful coming-out scenes or adolescent wrestling with the am-I-or-aren’t-I? question—Leticia just wants to find love. Putting her film degree to good use working at a dog-grooming salon, Leticia makes a big mistake with Edith, a drama-queen from Frisco with a penchant for quietly psychotic behavior and big scenes. Seemingly better, at first, is K, with whom Leticia has a love-at-first-sight moment at a party but takes a frustratingly long time to make any headway with. The author’s normally powerful sense of description fails her with K, who should be the vibrant character here but comes across fuzzily, with a few exceptions: “Turns out the pills were homeopathic decongestants . . . I found it almost scarier to realize that instead of being a junkie, K had a crunchy streak.” The two connect, move into a nice little house together, and everything seems to be going swimmingly. Only it’s not, because all this time newcomer Lemus is looping forward, backward and around in time, visiting Leticia’s childhood, her college years, scatterings of events from her young life, and her guilty relationship with Nana. It’s all seen through the girl’s compelling manner of outward strength and inner insecurity, and it’s related in a style warm and liquid—easy to slide right into. The story also traces a smart portrait of LA lesbian life, where there’s a depressing lack of good bars to go to, and the usually strong sense of subculture unity seems always to be on the verge of coming unglued due to bickering and breakups.
Spry debut from a writer who’s got the skills but needs to set her sights on bigger things.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-27856-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
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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