Stylish first novel, by journalist and performance artist Benz, about the sexual awakening of an adolescent girl. It’s 1963 when North Wagoner, 15, who has not yet had her first period, goes off for summer vacation on Glass Lake near Ypsilanti, Michigan. She—ll be staying with her cousin Dee Diehl and Uncle Judson, her mother’s brother, a plastic surgeon who reconstructs breasts and other damaged body parts, owns fancy cars, and has some peculiar hobbies. North has a crush on Jackie Kennedy, whom she resembles and has taken on as a surrogate big sister. She’s also just starting driver’s training, and Uncle Judd, who likes to take photos of her naked, uses his niece’s interest in cars to make several touchy-feely moves on her. Queen Mom and Dad, meanwhile, are off on a European tour (and apparently have no interest in having their daughter tag along). In Glass Lake, though, cousin Dee is leading shrinking violet North into the sexual mazes of the local dating rituals, and the girl once catches Dee having sex with her boyfriend Shrimp. When Dee starts vomiting and becomes moody and withdrawn, it doesn—t take North long to figure out that her cousin is pregnant. The increasingly outgoing North wins a drag race, driving Uncle Judd’s Stingray, but then finds herself uncomfortable being driven anywhere by a man. Back at school in the fall, she’s still pursued by Uncle Judd and at last begs her mother for help. But Queen Mom thinks her daughter’s infatuation with Jackie Kennedy, and the First Lady’s tragic problems, has induced North to fabricate the whole incident, which suggests that for girls molestation within the family is a no-win situation. A frank and convincing portrait of a young woman’s painful coming-of-age.
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-885266-59-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
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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