This is a vital, riveting anthology that emphasizes the complexity and diversity of minority experience.
Short fiction from a diverse array of writers of color.
Gathering both emerging and established voices, editor Baker has produced a vital anthology whose strength lies in its unwillingness to commit to a single genre or style. Some of the stories, like Courttia Newland's creepy science-fiction adventure "Link," are explicitly political. Newland tells the story of Aaron, a black British college student who possesses mysterious psychic abilities. On the eve of the 2016 Brexit referendum, he encounters other young people of color with similar abilities; soon, they face the temptation of using their powers to punish those who would exclude them. Other stories, like Glendaliz Camacho's haunting "Long Enough to Drown," are less explicitly political. Camacho concerns herself with the particular textures of an Afro-Latinx woman's romantic longing for her dead boyfriend's brother. Brandon's race—he is a white Irish man, "quite the trophy to bring home," as the narrator says—raises important questions about what drives desire. Alexander Chee's "Mine" follows a young gay son of Korean immigrants. Perhaps the most surprising entry comes from Brandon Taylor: His lyrical "Boy/Gamin" follows a young white boy from childhood to adolescence. Written in the urgency of the present tense, the story tracks Jackson's struggle to accommodate his budding desire for other boys. One of those love interests is a young black boy named Eric, about whom Jackson has vivid fantasies. While floating off the Montgomery, Alabama, shore, "he imagines he can feel Eric's fingers on his stomach...he sees Eric's face, long and angular like a dog's, black skin everywhere, green eyes staring over thick lashes. He's beautiful and skinny and Jackson wants to punch him in the nose to make him ugly." This sentence displays the audacious complexity of Taylor's prose as he straddles the confusion of adolescent desire, emerging queerness, and racial difference. Not every story works: Jason Reynolds' "African-American Special" relies too heavily on voice, while Yiyun Li's "A Sheltered Woman" suffers for not having enough space to unfold the mysteries that accumulate around Chinese immigrant Auntie Mei.
This is a vital, riveting anthology that emphasizes the complexity and diversity of minority experience.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3494-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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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