A coming-of-age story capturing male adolescence in all its disgusting, irrational, and messy glory.
In the summer before high school, a down-on-his-luck outsider turns to the only thing he trusts: his journal.
Miles Lover—or Retard, as his “friends” have dubbed him—hates a lot of things: school, his parents, his younger twin sisters, his old house, his neighbors, bodily functions, death, and seemingly everything in between. He takes too many drugs, drinks too much, and skates too hard. The diary structure—and lack of dated entries—evokes the feeling of endless summer that Miles hates so much. The book meanders and unfolds based on whatever Miles feels compelled to divulge at the moment, the short vignettes swinging rapidly from honesty to bluster in true teenage fashion. Sometimes he writes about his recent crush or ruminates on innocuous idioms, and other times he contemplates his parents' divorce and his own mortality. Though Miles loses his temper and never seems to do anything right, Reed (Miraculous Fauna, 2016, etc.) offers empathetic glimpses into his psyche, including his incessant worrying about his mother and tenderness toward animals and nature. Reed convincingly writes a three-dimensional teenager whose self-consciousness, emotions, and hormones threaten to crush him. What Miles wants to do and what he does are constantly at odds; for a boy who always fights with his mother, he surprises himself throughout the book with his caring (“Sometimes after my mother goes to bed, I come and tuck her in for the night”). Near the end of the summer, Miles’ luck seems to change when his path crosses with that of his new elderly neighbor, Mister Reese, who his sisters believe is a murderer. The newfound friendship provides some of the most self-aware moments of his summer, which feel not only earned, but necessary.
A coming-of-age story capturing male adolescence in all its disgusting, irrational, and messy glory.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61902-537-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
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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