By turns magical, harshly realistic, poetic, aggravating, and enthralling.
Centered around an actual Memorial Day flood in 2015, Dinan’s first novel takes a mildly numinous, not so mildly pre-apocalyptic approach in following the lives of a young Texas Hill Country teenager and her loved ones as they fight to find each other, or at least survive, in their suddenly devastated landscape.
Supersensitive Boyd, 18, has an unusual, not necessarily welcome, ability: Like a dowser, she can sense others’ pain. Home-schooled, she lives with her mother, Lucy Maud, who has divorced but not stopped loving her father, Kevin, a classics professor now living in Austin and in love with one of his grad students. Boyd’s dearest friend and sort of lover is Isaac, a pre-med student at the University of Texas. Isaac and Boyd plan to spend the summer panning for gold in Boyd’s backyard and figuring out where their relationship is going given that introverted Boyd wants to stay in their safe, isolated rural world while down-to-earth Isaac yearns to leave and lead a more conventional, materialistic life. But when the rains pour down, ending a long drought, on the same weekend that Boyd’s maternal grandfather is getting married with her father as best man, Boyd and Isaac each end up alone. Isaac finds himself stranded high in a pecan tree with an array of usually wild animals while a river surges below. Sensing that he's in danger, Boyd goes searching for him. Along the way she meets a number of otherworldly characters caught in a quirk of time caused by the weather. (Think Dorothy in a nightmarish Oz, especially when a scarecrow comes to life.) Meanwhile, as Lucy Maud and Kevin set out together to look for their daughter, they struggle individually with their complex, unresolved relationship. If the storm is an omen of the climate risk the world currently faces, the dead cellphones beleaguering the characters represent communication breakdown on a deeper scale. Dinan breaks up the narrative with short, educational, sometimes didactic sections that illuminate the title by defining flash floods, bemoaning climate change, and explaining gold mining, among other topics.
By turns magical, harshly realistic, poetic, aggravating, and enthralling.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63557-443-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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