A study of transexuality that’s shot through with melancholy while capturing the bliss of discovering one’s sexual self.
A young man wrestles with gender expectations and his own gender identity in this quietly forceful debut from the Seattle-based author.
Growing up in exurban Ontario, Peter was always the outlier, preferring his three sisters’ girlish behavior over that of his rough-and-tumble male classmates. But his attempts to push his boyishness aside—cooking while wearing a much-loved apron, for instance—incur the wrath of his father, a conservative Chinese immigrant. As his sisters move away, Peter fends for himself in Montreal, taking odd restaurant jobs that give him a small supportive tribe and an opportunity to make sense of his sexuality. While the book has its share of clashes with bigotry, its strength is in its interiority: Fu subtly and poetically evokes the intensity of need her narrator feels to become female. (“What would turn me into them?” Peter thinks, watching a group of women at a nightclub. “Could I peel it all off their faces and bodies with a paint trowel and spread it over my surface?”) Peter’s gender anxiety inevitably leads him down frustrating paths, such as one affair with a middle-aged woman whose domination turns abusive and another with a woman who’s futilely trying to submerge her lesbianism through an ex-gay ministry. Yet Fu is skilled at capturing feelings of rootlessness that go beyond gender, encompassing Peter's immigrant-son status and distance from his family. All of Peter’s emotional baggage makes the novel tonally somber, but Peter’s search for a sense of normalcy—to finally become his female self—has a redemptive trajectory that feels fully earned.
A study of transexuality that’s shot through with melancholy while capturing the bliss of discovering one’s sexual self.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-544-03472-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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