A quietly remarkable achievement of pathos and wit.
A teenaged track star in Missouri uses his gift for speed to cope with traumatic loss—in a first novel that gives new life to the subject of athletics and coming of age.
Kevin Schuler is a popular member of the eighth-grade track team in his small elementary school—14 of the 16 students in the entire grade are on the team. The story opens with a wonderful, heartbreaking set piece, an away meet that vividly brings the team to life as a unit and as individuals—until the school van goes off a bridge on the way home. Everyone dies. Only Kevin, who’d driven home separately with his parents, is left. His response is to lose all memory of the accident and his friends. The following August he enters ninth grade at a large high school in a nearby town, feeling grateful for the anonymity it offers. On the track team, he soon realizes that only in the silence that running—and running fast—creates do the memories return. His talent for speed is quickly noted and exploited by school authorities. In a Dickensian approach, Jackson concocts a slightly absurd, almost humorous plot about institutional greed and social malfeasance complete with preposterous names for supporting characters, such as the villainous school superintendent Umbar Porphorhessohln. But Kevin narrates with a matter-of-fact formality and refreshing lack of psychological posturing. He loves his simple parents, who have no clue about his emotional life, and he respects authority as long as he can. He tentatively enters into new friendships—with a black football star, with the sexy school newspaper reporter who takes her reporting very seriously, and with a sensitive, not very good girl runner who finally wins his heart. The story’s modulated pace, not unlike a long-distance race, can be lulling at times but ends in a satisfying burst of speed and exhaustion.
A quietly remarkable achievement of pathos and wit.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-28808-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
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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