There are few challenges greater than voicing a smart, tough kid. Fans of teen fiction or hard-boiled detectives will find...
An uncompromising 12-year-old gumshoe takes on the case of his short life.
The hero of this debut novel is a boy detective, “Huge,” who has as much in common with Encyclopedia Brown or the Hardy Boys as Al Swearengen has with The Lone Ranger. A foul-mouthed, scrappy sixth grader with a skyrocketing IQ, Eugene Smalls might be a runt in the eyes of his peers but, in his mind, he’s bigger than life—hence the name—and determined to live up to the example set by Raymond Chandler’s famous description of what a detective must be in The Simple Art of Murder (“down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid”). “Sure, I realized I didn’t exactly fit the bill, because most around here would tell you that I was meaner than a short-order cook and more tarnished than all the girls in Catholic school,” says Huge. “So I had two strikes against me from the jump. But I had one thing in my favor: I wasn’t afraid of a goddamn thing.” Armed with a hero who assumes the most eye-catching characteristics of Holden Caulfield, Phillip Marlowe and Nick Twisp, Fuerst crafts a readable alternative noir set in the early 1980s. Huge takes on the only case he can land, solving the mystery of who tagged his grandmother’s nursing home for the princely sum of $10. To his credit, Fuerst pulls off the same trick as the 2005 film Brick in making his protagonist’s suburban surroundings and mundane foes seem as hard-boiled and corrupt as those in the Chandler novels Huge treasures. With period detail intact—Huge’s sources hang out in the arcade, while the private eye rides a bike with a banana seat—Fuerst still manages to integrate into the mix seedy bureaucrats, treacherous friends and even a couple femme fatales. Bonus points for capturing the pathos of adolescence without talking down to the audience.
There are few challenges greater than voicing a smart, tough kid. Fans of teen fiction or hard-boiled detectives will find this one credible and engaging.Pub Date: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-45249-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
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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