Well-written, but readers will struggle to care about the fates of Clyde, the Smalls or any of the other characters.
For his debut novel, Harvkey gathers together an odd band of malcontents and down-on-their-luck types in this tale of a man who believes he has run out of options and the people who offer him one.
Clyde Twitty is a man on the downswing. He’s lost a job and most of his pride and lives with his elderly mother in a depressed area of Missouri. The day-to-day struggle of trying to hold on to their little home, which is also the base of his mother’s beauty salon business, has left the young man as worn and disillusioned as his old uncle Willie, who lives in a mobile home with his ancient dog. But then Clyde meets the Smalls family: patriarch Jay, an odd man with a pushy personality; Jan, his big-busted wife; and Tina Louise, their teenage daughter. Jay bullies Clyde into learning karate from him, and Tina makes him her lover, quickly integrating the impressionable Clyde into their large clan of cousins and followers. But there is more to the Smalls than meets the eye, and it’s not simply the fact that Tina Louise sells Amway. They’ve launched a war on everyone they consider an enemy, and in their book, a lot of people and groups fall into that category. Soon, Clyde is knee-deep in violence, and there’s no looking back, and what he finds out about himself, and the subsequent direction his life takes, is fodder for Harvkey’s pen. Harvkey is clearly a talented writer, but his subject matter is disheartening. Not everyone will want to climb inside the head of someone as clearly out of control as Jay Smalls, and those who do might find the story more depressing than the reality upon which it is based.
Well-written, but readers will struggle to care about the fates of Clyde, the Smalls or any of the other characters.Pub Date: April 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61902-294-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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