Africa is more than window-dressing here, and the workings of Tatum’s mind are wonderfully, if exhaustively, revealed in all...
Short-fiction writer Kai draws on her experiences in Tanzania to debut with an eerily honest story of adolescent obsession that conjures up Nabokov even as it offers a fresh and grounded view of East Africa.
Through the eyes of 14-year-old Tatum, on her first visit to Dar es Salaam and in the bosom of her wealthy family—brother, sister, mom, and stepdad—what’s exotically other and what’s hers to manipulate quickly become indistinguishable. Practically from her first sight of Mo, her stepdad Jack’s Indian bachelor friend, Tatum has romantic designs. Fueled by the advice columns of Cosmopolitan and big sis Mona’s own mooning over their driver Salim, roiled by her fantasies and by having seen Jack enter a whorehouse, she plots the stages of Mo’s seduction with consummate care even as she copes with emotional turbulence. A swimming encounter allows him to see her as more than just the “little girl” he dismissed her as to his sister, and a club party offers the perfect opportunity for Tatum to act: dressed to kill in a short black number she insisted her mother buy for her, she gets Mo to dance, and his hard-on tells her he’s paying attention. From there it’s simply a matter of getting the family to leave her behind for a week after they go home—in the care of Jack’s good buddy Mo, of course (who still lives with his mother)—and then pouring it on whenever she gets a chance. The part where romance turns to raw sex still isn’t clear to her, but no matter: Tatum will not be denied.
Africa is more than window-dressing here, and the workings of Tatum’s mind are wonderfully, if exhaustively, revealed in all their blooming, buzzing confusion.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-882593-61-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Bridge Works
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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 raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.
A young man writes a letter to his illiterate mother in an attempt to make sense of his traumatic beginnings.
When Little Dog is a child growing up in Hartford, he is asked to make a family tree. Where other children draw full green branches full of relatives, Little Dog’s branches are bare, with just five names. Born in Vietnam, Little Dog now lives with his abusive—and abused—mother and his schizophrenic grandmother. The Vietnam War casts a long shadow on his life: His mother is the child of an anonymous American soldier—his grandmother survived as a sex worker during the conflict. Without siblings, without a father, Little Dog’s loneliness is exacerbated by his otherness: He is small, poor, Asian, and queer. Much of the novel recounts his first love affair as a teen, with a “redneck” from the white part of town, as he confesses to his mother how this doomed relationship is akin to his violent childhood. In telling the stories of those who exist in the margins, Little Dog says, “I never wanted to build a ‘body of work,’ but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work.” Vuong has written one of the most lauded poetry debuts in recent memory (Night Sky with Exit Wounds, 2016), and his first foray into fiction is poetic in the deepest sense—not merely on the level of language, but in its structure and its intelligence, moving associationally from memory to memory, quoting Barthes, then rapper 50 Cent. The result is an uncategorizable hybrid of what reads like memoir, bildungsroman, and book-length poem. More important than labels, though, is the novel’s earnest and open-hearted belief in the necessity of stories and language for our survival.
A raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-56202-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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