Engrossing, with indelible scenes and a protagonist to care about.
McDonell, who at 17 made a splash with his debut, Twelve (2002), delivers an assured and heartfelt second.
The narrator, Mike, 19 when we first meet him, works as an intern for an English language news magazine in Hong Kong. It’s a job he got because managing editor Elliot Analect is an old Harvard friend of his fathers’s. It’s a job that pretty much bores Mike silly, so that he jumps at the chance to go to Bangkok to help research a story on back-packing kids and their drugs of choice. “ ‘Just don’t get arrested,’ ” his boss tells him. He almost does, and on one occasion he’s almost killed. Much that happens to him in Thailand is unsettling, nightmarish even, but what calls him home is worse. Mike’s is a family on the far side of dysfunctional—both parents alcoholics, a brother whose hold on emotional equilibrium is tentative to say the least. And yet he loves them, and when they can, they love him back. Rich, talented, charming—he thinks of them as a “catalog people, handsome and expensive”—they have made his growing up both pain- and pleasure-filled. He returns from Asia because tragedy has struck, forcing him into a complex and unwelcome role—his older brother’s keeper. Most of Part Two is devoted to the horror of 9/11, understatedly but brilliantly reported, as Mike, fearing that Lyle, his brother, might be one of those trapped, works his way toward a devastated downtown. Part Three is a kind of coda, a squaring up, as Mike, now 21, attempts to come to terms with life’s savagery.
Engrossing, with indelible scenes and a protagonist to care about.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1802-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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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