A lurid, gripping debut.
Blue’s self-published sensation—it has reportedly sold 65,000 copies—shows a bright young woman fighting her way out of New York’s meanest streets, only to return and try to save the man she loves.
With an unknown father and a junkie prostitute mother, hazel-eyed Silver Jones learns at an early age to defend herself and look after her friends. These include Chance Haze, a soulful but troubled boy shuffled from one abusive foster home to another. The two kids are inseparable until Chance is carted off to juvenile detention after killing another boy in a street fight. When her mother is brutally murdered by a serial killer, Silver is forced to live with her grandmother, a vicious woman who beats her and drinks. She escapes to stay with her mother’s old friend Birdie, a transsexual ex-hooker, but flees when Birdie’s rough-trade boyfriend tries to assault her. Out in the streets, she runs into Chance, now a low-level gangster. They fall in love, but he breaks up with her after he finds out she has won a scholarship to Spellman, believing that his lifestyle would hinder her. Heartbroken, Silver nevertheless excels in college and returns to New York to attend NYU Medical School. She reunites with Chance, who is now a high-powered drug lord, but in her eyes will always be the same sweet boy she befriended at age 11. They get engaged, and Chance vows to go straight. But he quickly finds out it’s not so easy. Longtime partner Hollis, a hotheaded psycho who wants to take over the business, sets Chance up, getting him nearly killed and then arrested. Silver assembles a crew of old Harlem friends and executes an intricate plot to take down Hollis and free her man. Blue’s clunky dialogue runs the gamut from corny and sentimental to wickedly profane, but it’s hard not to root for his feisty heroine, who never once plays the victim.
A lurid, gripping debut.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-49264-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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
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