Beagin secures her position as a new writer to watch.
A welcome sequel to one of last year’s most exciting debuts.
The first chapter of Beagin’s second novel is called “Poop.” Readers familiar with Pretend I’m Dead (2018) will not be surprised. Readers approaching Beagin for the first time should consider it an honest advertisement of what’s to come. Mona is a cleaning lady, which is to say that her business is filth. As she did in her debut, Beagin takes advantage of the peculiarly intimate relationship in which we engage when we pay other people to clean up our messes. Mona’s clients include a blind psychotherapist and her husband, who happens to be the man Mona calls Dark, someone she met once and can’t get out of her mind. There’s also a Hungarian couple, for whom she becomes a nude model. Mona’s complicated entanglements with these people are inevitable. She has some serious boundary issues, which we grow to understand in some detail in the chapter called “Mommy.” Mona is a tremendously engaging narrator. She’s sharp but not unkind. By the time this novel begins, she’s turned Fresh Air host Terry Gross into her imaginary sidekick, someone who "interview[s] her about the day-to-day hassles of being a cleaning lady in Taos" and sometimes acts as her "coach, therapist, surrogate parent." This is both funny and poignant—funny because it’s so unlikely, poignant because Mona could use a levelheaded friend. Indeed, Beagin excels at mixing comedy and pathos in a way that dilutes neither. This novel is ultimately a story about the meaning of home. Mona grew up shuttling between her grandparents’ apartment and her stepfather’s place. Neither was a great place for a child. She was institutionalized for a time. And then she was sent to live with a foster mother in Massachusetts. In Pretend I’m Dead, Mona follows a junkie to Taos. Here, she follows an innocuous nice guy to Bakersfield. What she discovers, though, is that the place she truly wants to be is the place she has created for herself.
Beagin secures her position as a new writer to watch.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8214-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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