Solar-Tuttle's fledgling effort has a beginning, middle, and end—but otherwise bears little resemblance to a real novel.
Youth-directed imprint’s latest installment: a cringe-inducing first novel tracking a heavy-partying University of Pennsylvania sophomore who undergoes “buzz kill” with existential repercussions while watching Number 6 fumble the football during a Penn-Cornell game.
Rebecca “Beck” Lowe is supposed to be “the one who makes the plans,” the multi-shot drinker at all-night frat bars who can then churn out a paper for her morning class, the full-of-fun entertainer and reluctant virgin who quotes from Jay McInerney's Story of My Life. According to Beck, however, she's also a vulnerable only child harboring deep-seated wounds concerning her working parents' tough-love inattention to her quirkiness. Doesn't her mother owe her an apology for criticizing the paper she wrote comparing Walt Whitman's poetry and Jesse Jackson's speeches, especially since it gained her an A-plus? The problem is, Beck's not sure who she is or is supposed to be, and climbing drunkenly into eager guys' dorm beds every night while waiting for the “one good one” doesn't help her. Will it be Ryan, the tall, well-meaning freshman who lied about his age and never calls? Or totally nice Trey, or solicitous, always-faithful Scott, or one of their helpful best friends? When Beck sees Number 6 fumble at the big game, she feels the magnitude of other people's expectations and the irksome weight of having to “sit down and think about things.” “I'm like this cliché fall-apart girl crying under the vines,” reads a typical breast-beating passage of this adolescent diary. Unfortunately, the author's slangy, pedestrian prose can't compel a reader to care one way or the other about her character's growing pangs.
Solar-Tuttle's fledgling effort has a beginning, middle, and end—but otherwise bears little resemblance to a real novel.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7434-2851-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: MTV Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
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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