A sensitive exploration of what it’s like to live at life’s emotional poles.
A Korean teenager struggles with a rare emotional impairment.
Soon Yunjae, a highly intelligent teenage boy who lives with his mother and grandmother in Seoul, suffers from alexithymia, a defect believed to be rooted in the amygdala—the almond-shaped region of the brain—that renders him incapable of expressing, or even identifying, his emotions. Yunjae’s antagonist, nicknamed Gon, has returned to his home after 13 years following a mysterious disappearance that saw him shunted among various foster homes and finally to a youth shelter. In that long exile, he’s become a hardened juvenile delinquent, bitter toward the father he believes abandoned him and acting out at every opportunity. When Yunjae becomes the victim of an act of random violence that shatters his life and thrusts him into an unwanted state of independence, Gon, sensing his classmate’s vulnerability, singles him out for special torment. The radical imbalance between Gon’s physical and emotional abuse and Yunjae’s inability to respond in any meaningful way fuels the novel’s escalating tension and justifies Yunjae’s blunt description of his story as one “about a monster meeting another monster.” But that imbalance subtly shifts as the two damaged boys inch toward something that looks like a friendship and becomes more complicated when a young girl named Dora enters the picture. In her debut novel, director and screenwriter Sohn makes the bold decision to choose an emotionally constricted first-person narrator, but the risk pays off. With the aid of a skillful translation, she conveys the hollowed-out feeling of Yunjae’s life and his almost inexpressible desire to overcome it, heightened by the contrast with Gon’s inability to control his rage. The novel will appeal fully to adults, but mature young readers who must cope in their everyday lives with the struggles of late adolescence will find themselves identifying with Yunjae and moved by his plight.
A sensitive exploration of what it’s like to live at life’s emotional poles.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296137-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperVia
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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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