Wildly uneven, awesomely ambitious: a mess, in fact, but you can’t help but be impressed by the author’s commitment and...
Hill (Dixie Church Interstate Blues, stories, not reviewed) lards 2,500 years of history and misery onto the 17-hours-and-27-minutes-long drama of a little girl's rescue from a mineshaft.
“It is Monday, June 9, 2003,” the omniscient narrator informs us. “Our story begins long before, if we believe that all back story is also story, that the underside of the iceberg explains what we see above.” You have been warned: connections will be made, moral lessons will be underscored, the small niceties of the well-made novel will be disdained. The author introduces us to an appealing young family—Annie Maki, Justin Wong, and their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter Ursula—and sets up a strongly emotional premise as Ursula vanishes down a hole in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Hill then sends us back to China in the 3rd century b.c., beginning a saga that will unfold in 8th-century Finland, 17th-century Canada and Sweden, and 19th-century California, delving into the experiences of the Finnish and Chinese immigrants to America whose blood flows in Ursula’s veins, with a few chapters interpolated to remind us she’s still underground. Reminiscent of Annie Proulx's Accordion Crimes in its relentless catalogue of disasters and willingness to yank readers away from characters just as they're beginning to engage our interest, the narrative aims to make a political point as women are abused, workers die due to companies’ negligence, and rich brat Jinx Muehlenberg hits ten-year-old Annie with her car and speeds away, crippling the girl for life. The fact that Jinx later makes a pass at Justin while he’s working on her house is practically the least outlandish coincidence in a story crammed with unlikely conjunctions. Why does all this madness sometimes work? Because Hill’s prose is vivid, if undisciplined, and her passion is ultimately contagious. The cumulative impact of all those ancestors’ stories adds an epic grandeur and surprising emotional punch to the finale, when Hill finally deigns to allow us to follow step by step the painstaking effort to bring Ursula out of the shaft.
Wildly uneven, awesomely ambitious: a mess, in fact, but you can’t help but be impressed by the author’s commitment and boldness.Pub Date: June 11, 2004
ISBN: 1-56512-388-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
Wickedly sharp, if not altogether pleasant, it’s a near-perfect realization of a singular vision—and definitely not for...
A viciously funny bloodbath eviscerating the rarefied world of elite creative writing programs, Awad’s latest may be the first (and only?) entry into the canon of MFA horror.
Samantha Heather Mackey is the single outsider among her fiction cohort at Warren University, which is populated by Bunnies. “We call them Bunnies,” she explains, “because that is what they call each other.” The Bunnies are uniform in their Bunniness: rich and hyperfeminine and aggressively childlike, fawning over each other (“Can I just say I loved living in your lines and that’s where I want to live now forever?”), wearing kitten-printed dresses, frequenting a cafe where all the food is miniature, from the mini cupcakes to the mini sweet potato fries. Samantha is, by definition, not a Bunny. But then a note appears in her student mailbox, sinister and saccharine at once: an invitation to the Bunnies’ Smut Salon, one of their many Bunny customs from which Samantha has always been excluded, like “Touching Tuesdays” or “making little woodland creatures out of marzipan.” And even though she despises the Bunnies and their cooing and their cloying girlishness and incomprehensible stories, she cannot resist the possibility of finally, maybe being invited into their sweet and terrifying club. Smut Salon, though, is tame compared to what the Bunnies call their “Workshop,” which, they explain, is an “experimental” and “intertextual” project that “subverts the whole concept of genre,” and also “the patriarchy of language,” and also several other combinations of creative writing buzzwords. (“This is about the Body,” a Bunny tells Samantha, upon deeming her ready to participate. “The Body performing in all its nuanced viscerality.”) As Samantha falls deeper into their twee and terrifying world—drifting from her only non-Bunny friend in the process—Awad (13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, 2016) gleefully pumps up the novel’s nightmarish quality until the boundary between perception and reality has all but dissolved completely. It’s clear that Awad is having fun here—the proof is in the gore—and her delight is contagious.
Wickedly sharp, if not altogether pleasant, it’s a near-perfect realization of a singular vision—and definitely not for everyone.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-55973-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
PROFILES
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
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