Teen angst south-of-the-border: Monroy’s debut is most notable for its pungent characterization of Mexico City, where...
A bright teenager whose free-spirited Foreign Service worker mother is transferred to Mexico City spends a momentous senior year struggling to find herself at an elite private school.
After a few stable years in Washington, D.C., Milagro “Mila” Epstein has plenty of misgivings when landing in the smoggy splendor of Mexico City. An excellent student raised in various countries by her single mother, Maggie, she is understandably curious to finally be living in the hometown of her biological father—a married Mexican politico whom Maggie refuses to name. (Her mom’s secret, which she claims to be keeping in an effort to protect them both, is but a small obstacle to the intrepid Mila, who has ambitions of becoming a journalist.) What really stresses the 17-year-old out is starting over at a new school. The fortress-like International School of Mexico (ISM) is about as cliquey as they came. A hotbed of sex, drugs and underage drinking, ISM has a student body made up of American kids with parents working in the city, a majority being the glamorous offspring of Mexico’s moneyed upper class (known as “fresas,” or strawberries, in the local slang). The fresas live in a rarified world of extreme privilege, with designer clothing, private cars with drivers and a lack of supervision that American kids can only dream of. Initially, Mila hangs out with her own kind, even losing her virginity, disastrously, to a friendly seeming boy-next-door type who never learned that no means no. She also experiments with drugs (and dealers) and battles with her well-meaning mother. Of course, Maggie has dramas of her own: She starts dating her married boss after her stand-up boyfriend Armando is murdered. When Mila starts dating the dreamy fresa Manuel, Maggie cannot help but approve. The son of a well-connected plastic surgeon, Manuel introduces the girl to the upper echelons of Mexican society, including the mystery man who may or may not be her dad. It is then left to Mila to decide how far to go for the truth.
Teen angst south-of-the-border: Monroy’s debut is most notable for its pungent characterization of Mexico City, where political assassinations and bribery are commonplace in a 12th grader’s life.Pub Date: June 10, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-52359-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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
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