Different time period, but the message is still the same and as bleak as Peckinpah’s: Even a world of thieves needs...
Blake makes a small leap from the grotesquely amusing Roaring Twenties’ crime-spree scene in A World of Thieves (2002), switching to Depression-era Texas with a Tex-Mex cast.
Mexico’s in mid-Revolution in 1914, and gunfire in Juàrez can be heard across the Rio Grande at Mrs. O’Malley’s whorehouse in El Paso, when Pancho Villa himself comes to bed his choice gringo, the freckled Irish redhead Megan. He comes with Rodolfo Fierro, who just that day has killed 300 Federal prisoners before coming to Mrs. O’Malley’s. Something fiery about Fierro causes his whore, Spooky Ava (real name: Ella), to remove her pessary and go for love. Pregnant, she marries rancher Cullen Youngblood and gives birth to James Rudolph Youngblood. Our only hint about her past is that she was once thought crazy. On New Year’s Eve 1936, we meet Jimmy, now 21, in the Free State of Galveston, the nation’s most wide-open gambling city, and, as we meet Jimmy the Kid, who has graveyard eyes, he’s driving an ice pick into Willie Rags’s heart. Jimmy’s an enforcer, bagman, and bodyguard for Rose and Sam Maceo, who suck up all the gambling profits on the island and in Galveston County, and Willie Rags worked for foolish folk trying to muscle in on Maceo territory. Sam does the glad-handing and charitable handouts for public welfare, and Rose is the strong-arm, assisted by his Ghosts, who also help keep the local crime rate down. Jimmy is Rose’s personal bodyguard, at times assisted by fellow Ghosts Raymond Brando (not Don Corleone but a great mimic) and LQ (from Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country). Rags’s rival mob in Houston wants its slots back. Bloody business affairs follow. Then Jimmy meets skin-tingling Daniela Zarate, whom he dives into Mexico to save.
Different time period, but the message is still the same and as bleak as Peckinpah’s: Even a world of thieves needs rules—and loyalty.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-380-97751-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
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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