Sad, violent, frustrating stories told in high-energy language, creating a very real imaginary world.
Thirteen stories chronicle the way things go for the African-American residents of Cross River, a fictional town in Maryland, in this debut collection.
A man who fails at hanging himself also fails at entertaining at his son’s birthday party in a ratty Cookie Monster suit. A man who can’t win at much else beats his 11-year-old daughter at chess 202 times in a row. A man trying to find his lost, addicted brother accidentally leads the people he’s hiding from right to him. A man goes to a barber who is certain to ruin his hair…and has his hair ruined. Kids torment their teachers, talk trash, throw rocks, are beaten by their parents, watch pornography on the eve of their religious confirmation. Nothing goes smoothly in Cross River, and most things go very badly indeed. As a footnote in a story called “Party Animal” explains, “It was determined that the CRPD, a largely African American force, was seventeen times more likely to use deadly force against minority suspects than similarly-sized police departments.” A guy on the way to a job interview is mistakenly arrested when he is taken for someone named Juba. Upon his release, he finds out that everyone in town knows about Juba but him. “Some said I was lucky I still had a life. Others tied Juba to a police slaying so many months ago. A good number of people described Juba as a happy-go-lucky guy, the Santa Claus of marijuana peddlers, a grandfatherly guy with good advice and a sack of chronic. Only I, it seemed, had never heard of Juba.” When he finally finds Juba, he finds a true son of Cross River, part ethnographer, part linguist, part historian. This is a town founded on the site of the only successful slave revolt in U.S. history. As the narrator of the final story, “Three Insurrections,” puts it, “They burn down the plantation and kill they masters dead….Got a town standing to this day in America. They ain’t never shut it down.”
Sad, violent, frustrating stories told in high-energy language, creating a very real imaginary world.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8131-6818-0
Page Count: 202
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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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