Third-novelist Miller gets the details down, but the characters remain clichés without inner lives or credibility.
Inner-city chronicler Miller (I’m Telling, 2002, etc.) returns to drug dealers, welfare moms, and violent teenagers.
Three twentysomething, politically correct friends are determined to survive and thrive: Brenda Carver is an African-American single mother of four, on welfare, who wants to be a novelist; Rosa Rivera is a Puerto Rican who dreams of becoming an actress; and Sharif Goldsby is a gay activist who wants to improve people’s lives. All three live in the Ida B. Barrett Wells Tower, a federally subsidized project in Harlem rumored to be scheduled for demolition and replacement by luxury apartments. Miller’s prose is as graphic and gritty as her setting, and the story, though not exactly uplifting, is testimony to hope and perseverance despite a slight presence of the clumsy and formulaic (in the epilogue we learn that the story just told is the first draft of Brenda’s roman à clef novel). The residents of Ida B. routinely defraud the federal government, sell stolen goods, take drugs, and have indiscriminate sexual liaisons. Their response to trouble is often violence, so when foster child Jimmy, who’s been living with Brenda’s mother across the hall, is brutally raped and murdered by Ronald, who lives with his mother in the block, Ronald is then shot in vengeance by another resident, the college-bound Ricky. Immediately, Brenda, whose son found Jimmy’s body stuffed into a clothes dryer; Rosa, who finally has a part in a downtown play; and Sharif, an old protest-pro, decide to get Ricky out of trouble. They organize protests against the police; with the help of Rosa’s well-connected director, they find a lawyer; and an old friend whose mom, the resident fence, lives in the block is willing for reasons of his own to confess to the murder. Ida B. is destined for destruction, but the three friends are not.
Third-novelist Miller gets the details down, but the characters remain clichés without inner lives or credibility.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-6001-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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