A tragic love story that ignores context and needs a more critical eye.
A lonely writer falls for a barely teenage girl, and together they embark on a disquieting road trip to wed in Mexico.
Jack Strabler is a lonely author living in the backwoods of Bristol, Tenn., whose solitary childhood and lack of close relationships have turned him into a reclusive figure motivated by his compulsions. The greatest of these is to write and battle his romantic loneliness, even entertaining the unsolicited email advances of a Russian girl named Natalya. But both writing and his Russian correspondence are swiftly forgotten when he encounters 13-year-old Audrey Miland—a precocious girl with eyes full of a perverse maturity and a past of hidden abuse. Overtaken by her coquettishness, Jack begins a vague, abstinence-based courtship with her. When they are found out and forbidden from contacting one another, Audrey finds a shrewd, horrifying solution. Renaming Audrey “Natalya,” the fugitive lovers flee to Mexico to get married, his Talya’s sole caveat for consummating their relationship. Kersh’s (Hotel Sarajevo, 2000) sophomore novel presents a modern-day version of Nabokov’s Lolita that often acknowledges but never escapes its own derivativeness, adding few contemporary flourishes to the narrative beyond superficial cultural references (Hollister, Lady Gaga). Underdeveloped as both a protagonist and narrator, Jack makes few attempts to evoke sympathy for himself, and it’s difficult to form a clear picture of him as a character since his personality shifts constantly. At times, he seems a pathetic figure, broken and obsessed only with matters outside himself, while in other situations he appears indifferent to everything save Audrey, a compelling contradiction that goes unexplored. The novel misses several similar opportunities, perhaps none richer than the ever-fluctuating roles Audrey and Jack take on in their relationship. Along with being disturbing lovers and clumsy friends, both take on complex parental roles with each other, a dichotomy disappointingly buried beneath their crossing obvious taboos. The novel downplays much of the vulgarity, attempting to accentuate the beauty, even the “magic,” of Audrey’s budding sexuality, but somehow it achieves the opposite, basking in a kind of titillation that is as confusing as it is disconcerting.
A tragic love story that ignores context and needs a more critical eye.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2012
ISBN: 978-1479207084
Page Count: 290
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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