An affecting, richly drawn, darkly humorous novel about grifting siblings, one worse than the other.
A series of shocking events, some instigated by the hapless protagonist, shakes up a Colorado family struggling to get by during the economic downturn of the late 1980s.
Things start going south for construction worker Shelley Cooper after a sudden mountain fire consumes the house on which he and his best friend, Mike, were toiling. When his boss rightly suspects he had something to do with an air processor that went missing after the blaze, Shelley loses his job. In desperate financial straits, he agrees to drive a shipment of marijuana to Houston for his brother, Clay, an ex-con who grows his own. "Don't think for a second I was dumb enough to figure it would turn out right," says Shelley, who has the $50,000 payday stolen by a young prostitute he let into his motel room. In fact, nothing ever goes right for him, including his impromptu marriage to his sister's friend Syrena. We are in an alternate Sam Shepard universe in which the battling brothers are too worn down by failure to fight. Moving back and forth in time with extreme subtlety, Gritton erects a penetrating family history of love, loss, loyalty, and betrayal. It takes a great writer to make a character as reprehensible as Shelley not only sympathetic, but almost likable. In fact, Shelley is not so dumb. He wryly reflects on billboards that read “HE IS RISEN” in the face of disaster and tells us how holding $50,000 in cash "feels like a blind rage, like a wolf howling at the moon." How did Shelley became the man he is? In this brilliant debut novel, there are many bread crumbs leading us back to possible answers.
An affecting, richly drawn, darkly humorous novel about grifting siblings, one worse than the other.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-947793-44-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
