A gripping novel to read alongside the work of contemporary Latinx writers.
Emilio, a "dreamer" and U.C. Berkeley student who has been deported to Guatemala, a country foreign to him, tries to return to the Bay Area home where he was raised.
Emilio’s mother, in Northern California, wants her son to stay put with a relative in rural Guatemala while an immigration attorney in the United States works on his case. But Emilio is young, bright, and afraid—that his life will pass him by waiting for the U.S. to get its immigration-policy act together and that he’ll never see his mother, two sisters, and girlfriend again. He embarks on the perilous journey back to California secretly, hoping he can make most of the trip before having to call his mother for help. Along the way, he befriends four Hondurans—Mathilde, Jonatan, Pedro, and William—and together they cross into Mexico, ride atop The Beast, the infamous freight train that travels north, and traverse the Sonoran Desert to cross the U.S.’s southern border. Marcom has crafted a harrowing, heartbreaking story. Emilio and his friends experience extreme violence and terror as well as deep wells of courage, resilience, and hope. The author explores the many ways people preserve their dignity in circumstances in which others with more power would reduce them to animals. While people do monstrous things, no one here is all monster. For every cartel henchman who abuses the migrants, there is a volunteer who offers them food, water, clothing, shelter, or words of comfort. Marcom’s plotting and pacing are well honed, and her prose is often revelatory, but a romance between Emilio and Mathilde feels jarring in its insistence on their inexhaustible nobility. Likewise, stories from other migrants riding the train, though well-told, feel like reportage conspicuously dropped into the story. The author's effort to “humanize” Emilio the Dreamer and the other Central American migrants raises questions about whom this novel is for and what it’s assuming about whose voices will be heard on migration.
A gripping novel to read alongside the work of contemporary Latinx writers.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2072-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
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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