Heartbreaking, eerie, and acutely observant.
Teenagers spend a hazy summer at the shore. One girl comes to terms with both her emerging independence and the mysterious death of a girl just like her.
Steinberg (Spectacle, 2013) writes in small, interconnected, and poetic fragments. She follows one unnamed teenager through a summer of partying that results in the drowning death of another local girl under mysterious circumstances. This is “a story about salvation,” she says, “but that doesn’t mean this girl was saved; and it doesn’t mean that we were saved; or that anyone was, or ever would be; it only means that something, in this moment, needed saving.” Through Steinberg’s poetic prose and chapters that braid together different timelines from the same summer, we come to learn of the girl’s feelings of guilt about her friend’s death. The same summer, the girl discovers her parents’ shortcomings and begins to fight against the stereotype of the drunken party girl that she sometimes embraces. Steinberg’s observations of the delicate workings of interpersonal relationships are astute. Her protagonist says, “What I mean is, girls, there is no love the way you think of love.” Love is the mysterious promise that hangs over all the sexual encounters at the shore; adults and teens alike allow the promise of love to draw them away from sensible behavior. Through her reflections on the night of the drowning and her conversations with her family following a shocking discovery about her father, the girl is both discovering her power and the gendered expectations that cage it. She begins to find her own voice, and she questions the culture that allowed her friend to drown—even though she is a complicit participant in that culture. “And that’s what happens when you drink,” she tells us, parroting the town’s gossip. “And that’s what happens when you fool around.”
Heartbreaking, eerie, and acutely observant.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-55597-847-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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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