Like life, not all the issues raised in this first novel are resolved.
In Young’s lyrical and atmospheric debut, two damaged outsiders, estranged from their families and cultures, struggle to discover where they really belong.
Fleeing Seattle after her husband leaves her for her younger sister, Mexican American anthropologist Claudia, distraught and humiliated, heads to the Makah reservation at Neah Bay, “an old whaling village on the northwest tip of the lower 48.” She hopes to bury herself in work, interviewing Maggie, an elderly woman she had befriended the previous summer: “Maggie would give her what she wanted, would tell her things about spirit animals and songs that she wasn’t supposed to reveal to anyone outside her family.” But standing in her way is Maggie’s son, Peter, who has returned home to care for his mother, newly diagnosed with dementia. Initially suspicious of Claudia, he realizes he can use her to tap into Maggie’s failing memories about his father’s murder. Likewise, by helping Peter sort through a trailer’s worth of possessions Maggie has been saving for her son, Claudia can mitigate her guilt that she “was hustling a hoarder.” As the two warily collaborate, their simmering mutual attraction explodes into violent passion, although Claudia fights to reclaim her anthropological distance. When she realizes that Maggie’s hoard is not junk but gifts saved for a potlatch, or ceremonial feast, to be thrown for her son, Claudia breaks academic protocol by offering to assist with the invitations. Peter, still haunted by his father’s death, resists reconciliation. Alternating between Claudia’s and Peter’s perspectives, the author creates moving portraits of two lonely, prickly people seeking to find their places in the world after so much pain and loss. Her lush, dense prose vividly captures the beauty of the Olympic Peninsula coast, but stylistic tics such as long, convoluted sentences slow the narrative, and abrupt transitions between the past and present sometimes confuse.
Like life, not all the issues raised in this first novel are resolved.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-59709-892-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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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