Smart, edgy, well written: an impressive first.
A confident and powerfully voiced first novel in which a couple—damaged, haunted and desperate—find redemption.
Having both just arrived at the airport in the Dominican Republic, Tollomi rescues Michelle from a customs nightmare. After this meeting, the two are inseparable, becoming more than friends and less than confidantes, sharing an enigmatic bond they’re afraid to speak of. Young and seemingly independent, Michelle has been traveling aimlessly, escaping something (even she’s not sure what—she suffers an amnesia that has erased chunks of her past and bits of her present), landing in the Dominican Republic to claim the house her grandparents bought in the ’40s on a whim. Tollomi, West Indies–born, American educated, travels the world helping the dispossessed, barely acknowledging his own exile from the island of his birth. To others, the pair seems charming and bright, but they can see each other for what they are—Tollomi being beckoned by mermaids to drown, Michelle followed by the ghost of her grandfather. She finds a job at an American bar and begins rebuilding her house, while Tollomi searches for the remains of a revolutionary movement that seems to have died with the assassination of its leader. He meets Carlitos, a young man selling sodas on the beach, and the two begin a doomed affair in the midst of burning gringo hotels and a fixed presidential election. As Michelle’s house nears completion, she becomes increasingly disturbed. Though suspecting the truth about her memory loss, Tollomi is too consumed with Carlitos (who may have ties to the torched hotels) to help her. The narrative is remarkably assured in weaving the futility of the revolutionary arsonists’ deeds (none of the hotels are really damaged, being made of cinderblock) with the futility of Michelle and Tollomi’s continuing to believe nothing is wrong with the other. A dramatic conclusion brings the chance of new life for both.
Smart, edgy, well written: an impressive first.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55583-644-5
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Alyson
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
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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