The closed ecosystem of The Shore provides Taylor with an ideal setting for illuminating the course of Life over Time.
An isolated stretch of coastal Virginia provides the eerie backdrop for a series of interconnecting tales of entrapment and escape.
Debut author Taylor focuses both a microscope and a telescope on a remote area of Eastern Virginia and its longtime residents in this novel made up of an array of linked stories. Set—primarily—on “The Shore,” a string of islands in the Chesapeake Bay that includes Assateague and the legendary Chincoteague, Taylor’s tales relate the lives of several of the area’s denizens over a two-and-a-half century span. Reaching into a dystopic future from a rural but far-from-idyllic past, Taylor weaves together accounts of misogyny, patricide, other garden-variety murders, and racism. The resulting collage of stories contains shifting narrators and perspectives as well as hints of family mystery. Few of the assembled tales lack a reference to pharmaceuticals of one sort or another, ranging from Native American plant lore to post-plague survival and the customs of the methamphetamine trade. Permeating each part of the work is a deep-rooted sense of place, from the endless marshes to the stink of the poultry farms. When one disaffected woman briefly escapes (with a drug-dealing boyfriend) to a farmhouse in the Blue Ridge Mountains, she discovers an antique bird cage in the attic—and it's hard not to think the residents of The Shore aren’t trapped in a much bigger, creepier bird cage.
The closed ecosystem of The Shore provides Taylor with an ideal setting for illuminating the course of Life over Time.Pub Date: May 26, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-553-41773-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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