Dubris (Weep Not, My Wanton, 2002, etc.), who spent 20 years as a 911 medic, serves up a heap of those proverbial eight...
Paramedic with a poetic soul cruises Manhattan’s mean streets, circa 1978, and gets an education.
When small-town girl Orlie Breton moves from her native Ohio to the East Village, it’s culture shock enough; landing a job as a paramedic in Harlem puts her on sensory overload. Orlie’s brittle first-person narrative puts the reader right over her shoulder in the ambulance, with gruff but easygoing partner Rodale, a.k.a. Rodie. He warns her that none of his partners last, but the duo gets along okay (and shares an affinity for Kerouac), the only tension coming from Rodie’s ex-partner, Miss Montalvo, who resembles a staid schoolmarm but relates to Rodie as a lover. Book’s title dates back to the 16th century (Orlie provides sources) and refers to street people. In Orlie’s new world, the foremost of these are a ubiquitous poet known as the albino, whose provocative verses appear on walls all over the city with increasing frequency, and an expansive drunk called Blind Samuels. On the home front, Orlie’s roommate Kim prowls the nightclub scene with her boyfriend Weenie, trying to advance her rock-music career. Orlie does well enough in Harlem to be promoted to Midtown and morgue duty. Dealing with corpses is only marginally better than dealing with the injured (a call to the subway tracks leads to a man cut in half but alive). At least her new partner, Jones, is more amiable than Rodie, who happens to be his cousin. Orlie earns a nickname—Little Bit—and through a strange series of events is reunited with high-school acquaintance Charlene, then a loser, now “adult” star Melissa Mounds. Orlie’s one brush with fame, via a heroic act, endangers the albino and adds suspense to the finale.
Dubris (Weep Not, My Wanton, 2002, etc.), who spent 20 years as a 911 medic, serves up a heap of those proverbial eight million stories with smoky nostalgia for pre-sanitized Manhattan.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-932360-25-5
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
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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