An ambitious, meticulously detailed story about modern Native American life, focusing on the struggle of a small, disenfranchised tribe in modern-day California to reclaim its heritage and identity. Sarris’s debut novel, like the tales in his collection, Grand Avenue (1994), is set in Santa Rosa, a small town on the California coast that’s been the home of the Waterplace Pomo since the tribe was forced off of its traditional lands. One of the many ironies at work here is that, while the local whites only guardedly accept the Pomos— presence, the town had in fact been founded by a Pomo (Rosa), who, more than a century before, gathered the remnants of the tribe together after it had been devastated by Mexican raiders. In present-day, it is Elba, an elderly woman, who has quietly labored to preserve Pomo traditions and the sense of tribal identity. Her 17-year-old grandson Johnny, who ekes out a living selling secondhand clothes, has become active in the battle to secure federal recognition for the Pomo so they can qualify for federal assistance—and even, perhaps, reclaim some of their land. Johnny’s mother, Elba’s daughter Iris, is furiously opposed to all of this, having spent her life trying to gain acceptance in white society. The story is narrated in turn by each of these three characters, allowing Sarris (himself the chairman of the Federated Coast Miwok tribe in California) to illuminate the varied ways in which Native Americans have tried in modern times to deal with the tribal devastation they—ve undergone. Elba is the dominant figure here; her memories, both of her people’s past and traditions and of her own tragic past, are haunting. The resolution, in which the three family members and the varied (and vividly rendered) tribe members begin to draw together in the wake of violence, is both subtle and deeply moving. Despite a pace that sometimes dawdles, Sarris’s vigorous prose and robust characters make for a distinctive work, marking the debut of a singularly talented novelist. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 1998
ISBN: 0-7868-6110-X
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998
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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