A thrilling story of teenage survival and camaraderie.
An emotionally troubled 18-year-old contends with an island boot camp in Robinson’s novel.
Whaleback Island, off the coast of Maine, is a summer retreat for wealthy members of the Club—business executives and bluebloods from New York and Boston whose connections to the island go back, in some cases, for generations. It’s also home to the Whaleback Island Leadership Detail (WILD), a program sponsored by the Club in which wayward youth are reformed into upstanding citizens by a team of exacting ex-military instructors. Walt McNamara was a hockey star at his prep school in New Hampshire before he quit the team in the midst of a playoff game and then shattered four of the school’s trophy cases with a chair. At WILD, he’s been assigned to the “huddle” led by Dick Grunewald, a grizzled, humorless man missing several fingers. His huddle includes Tess, a motel worker from Maryland, and the tall, silent, mysterious Aubrey. Each huddle works as a team to support each other during the rigorous—and somewhat martial—physical training they undergo with the vague promise of Club employment at the other end. As Walt and his new friends struggle to stay sane in the face of the brutal regimen, they begin to question the true purpose of WILD—and the agenda of the Club behind it. Robinson captures the angst and excitement of teenage spaces, even unlikely ones, as here when Walt’s huddle must all sleep spooned together on an exposed smaller island: “To feel the movement of her breath against my chest, to feel even the slightest contact of my legs against her, to smell her dirty hair, which had probably not been grimy like this before and still smelled good, I felt like a space explorer zooming through the cosmos.” The twists toward the story’s end are not quite believable, but the author constructs a rich world of substantial characters caught in the muddled aspirations of young adulthood.
A thrilling story of teenage survival and camaraderie.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781952143922
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Islandport Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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