Poetic, valuable look at the difficulties of being a woman in Saudi Arabia, and of growing up anywhere in the world.
Debut novel offers a rare window into young, lesbian Saudi culture.
In the heavily Shi’ite town of Qatif, a nameless teenage girl is tortured by lesbian desires and the urgent pressure she feels to suppress them. The first-person narrator’s various lovers introduce her to an underground world of lesbian parties, secret rendezvous and subversive online flirtations. References to modern life, like air conditioners and Google, seem bizarre within the context of a society otherwise locked in a trenchantly traditional past. Many of the websites the narrator searches for are blocked, a striking reminder of how pervasively controlled Saudi life is. Employing very little dialogue (perhaps as a reminder of how voiceless women are in Saudi society), the pseudonymous author casts her lyrical prose almost exclusively in the form of her protagonist’s ruminations. The heartbreaking use of words like intoxicated, filth and shame demonstrate beyond any doubt that the narrator believes her behavior is deviant and must be kept secret. There are men in her life: an absent father, a dead brother, a handful of male friends, even male romantic interests. But the dominant characters are female, her mother as well as her lovers. Although the novel provides a fascinating look into the silent half of this closed society, foreign readers will wish the author had explained more about daily life as a Saudi woman: what it’s like to cover oneself in an abaya, how it feels to be separated from men in every aspect of daily existence, what they think of the daily “Death to America” radio broadcast from Iran. (Presumably the intended audience is fellow Saudi women who need no explanation of these quotidian elements.) In some ways, however, the lack of explanations makes the story more powerful. Despite the extreme circumstances, the protagonist’s journey of self-discovery and the questions she reflects upon have universal appeal.
Poetic, valuable look at the difficulties of being a woman in Saudi Arabia, and of growing up anywhere in the world.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-58322-871-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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