Searing but incomplete coming-of-age novel; the characters are strongly outlined but the author fails to fill them out.
Headstrong daughter of a widowed, drug-addicted ne'er-do-well experiences adolescence in a blue-collar Chicago suburb in the 1960s and ’70s.
When Robin Simonsen is only nine years old, her mother dies of cancer and her father, Heath, moves the pair into his own mother's trash heap of a home in Lilac, Ill. There, he and Goldie, a former Vegas showgirl, sell broken or stolen items in their front yard. The small house is soon overrun with renegade characters, mostly men, who are there for Goldie's brash charms and Heath's latest venture: drug-peddling. Heath even sets up an old school bus in the backyard, where a mentally shattered Vietnam vet lives and where local teenagers smoke marijuana. Robin drifts from house to bus to school with no sense of boundaries or rules. She does learn some things along the way, mainly that she is attracted to both drugs and girls. She also defiantly befriends a young boy, Freddie, whose African-American family is the first in Lilac. His gentle, studious family is the antithesis of her own roguish clan, and Freddie is a good influence on the bright girl. Once she reaches high school, however, she uses drugs as a way to gain access to the cool crowd in an elaborate effort to become close to the school's prettiest girl, Lynn. As Robin struggles with her budding sexuality, she starts to lose her grip on what she needs to do to survive in her slippery world. To make matters worse, her father, a long-time heroin addict, is taking longer and longer trips away from home; Freddie is disappearing into a promising future for himself; and Lynn remains clueless about Robin's true feelings.
Searing but incomplete coming-of-age novel; the characters are strongly outlined but the author fails to fill them out.Pub Date: May 25, 2006
ISBN: 0-472-11561-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of Michigan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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