Devin (Elephant Girl, 2011) offers a story of a kindhearted man who struggles throughout his life with the weaknesses and selfishness of others.
This picaresque tale follows Easton McNeil, a short, baby-faced man who’s missing half his left leg. Readers first meet him as a child, bouncing between foster homes after he was taken from his parents due to their addictions and criminal pursuits. Easton overcomes a series of early setbacks, including the loss of his leg, before he graduates college and purchases a small home with money he made by selling a website he created. He strikes up a friendship with a neighborhood girl named Liberty whose family struggles parallel his own. Easton, who has an unexpectedly strong paternal instinct, becomes a kind of surrogate father to the girl even though her manipulative mother tries to poison their relationship. Later, Easton works for a well-known radio shock jock, takes an extended, meandering road trip from coast to coast, and begins his first true romance in his late 30s. The plot is episodic to a fault, but readers will remain engaged thanks to Devin’s deft characterizations. She displays a remarkable knack for developing pathos in even minor characters—and Easton’s curiosity and wanderlust bring him into contact with many. Easton himself proves to be more complex and less saccharine-sweet than he initially appears. The novel’s greatest accomplishment, however, is the way it balances sentimentality with misanthropy: Most of the characters prove to be duplicitous, base and almost unbearably selfish, but Devin’s approach doesn’t wallow in their faults, instead focusing on small, potent moments of connection and redemption. At times, the novel risks becoming overly sentimental, particularly during the late romance, but it never does so thanks to the author’s refusal to take the story down obvious paths. She develops characters that readers will care about and places them in a fantastical story that feels entirely real and possible.
A strong first novel from an author with potential.
Pub Date: May 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1494974107
Page Count: 348
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.
An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).
Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.Pub Date: April 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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