Overworked, but worth a read for its rough, raw and luridly realistic portrayal of inner-city strife.
Race relations and social upheaval permeate this frenetic novel set amid the 1992 trial of Los Angeles police officers accused of beating motorist Rodney King.
Baldwin parlays his real-life experiences teaching Southern Californian inner-city high-school students into his thorny, complicated, character-driven debut that follows a group of interconnected middle-class denizens through the urban underbelly of L.A. It’s 1992 and the crackle of gunfire is the norm to a crime-ridden area anxiously awaiting the verdict in the King trial. Besides white, ex-vice cop Michael Macetti, also struggling among the gangbangers and thieving thugs is local schoolteacher Olivia who is frustrated with her laid-off, drug-running husband Gunther, while Marcetti’s daughter, Sonja, an artistic high school senior, is torn between her interracial love affair with Anwar, Gunther’s straight-A son, and her affection for Bobby, the jock she left behind in La Jolla. Tensions mount when Kesha, a young teen, becomes the victim of a drive-by shooting at a local crack house run by the Crips gang that has been incrementally encroaching on Macetti’s neighborhood, making Gunther, a member of rival gang the Bloods, more vigilant about reclaiming his turf. Meanwhile, Sonia’s classmate Ishmael forms a deadly allegiance to Crips leader Rayhab, who is bent on revenge-killing Macetti. In Baldwin’s dark world of urban decay, the male characters tend to deliver the terse language, threats and violence while their female counterparts offer support and hope, yet exasperatingly spin in place. Macetti struggles to become the hero the story desperately needs, but his efforts are quickly trumped by a surfeit of menacing gang activity. Nevertheless, Baldwin’s bleak melodrama plods on, becoming hinged on the King verdict. When the verdict finally arrives, it throws the entire city into a tailspin of riots, looting, murder and uncontrollable mayhem, further exacerbating racial tensions and general desperation, which, depending on the reader, will either titillate or exhaust. Baldwin has assembled an edgy cast of characters that’s ambitiously broad and, with a few exceptions, richly realized. As slangy dialogue intensifies the relentlessly grim and aggressive plot, Baldwin thankfully allows for a few slivers of hope, such as Olivia’s defining sentiment to her friends early on that “faith is about all we’ve got.”
Overworked, but worth a read for its rough, raw and luridly realistic portrayal of inner-city strife.Pub Date: May 27, 2011
ISBN: 978-1460970782
Page Count: 314
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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