A dark, dystopian view of South Korean adolescence, hopelessness, and the cruelties children are capable of inflicting on...
In this coming-of-age novel by South Korean author Kim (Mina, 2018, etc.), two high school girls navigate violent bullies and absent, uncaring parents in an unnamed city on the coast.
"The city we lived in was ridiculous," Rang announces to the reader, "because it was a city that imitated Seoul." "Everybody who lived there was pretty much the same....Except there was one kid who wanted to be a fish." This is Rang's best friend, b. Rang points out that being a fish would mean having scales and being ugly, but b sticks to her guns: "I'll go into the water and I'll never come back out." Rang's parents show no interest in her while b's are overwhelmed by poverty and her sister's illness. Rang's beloved Grandma is drifting toward senescence. Don't ever get lost, she insists, or you'll wind up at the End, a place north of the hill where "the abandoned people" live. Rang and b play at the beach, struggle to fit in at school, and hang out at a cafe called Alone ("Adults thought the name was ridiculous...b and I thought it was cool"), where they meet a bookish loner. Rang is targeted by bullies at school, boys identified only by their baseball hats who regularly kick and hit her until she bleeds, and no one but b ever steps in. The girls are straddling childhood and young adulthood without guidance or help. And when Rang inadvertently exposes b's poverty, their friendship ends with devastating abruptness and pushes them separately toward the dreaded End. Told alternately from Rang’s and b's points of view, the text is broken into short, sometimes-dreamlike sections that capture their teenage angst and moods. "I feel agony and I'm getting even more boring." "I was incredibly hungry."
A dark, dystopian view of South Korean adolescence, hopelessness, and the cruelties children are capable of inflicting on each other.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-931883-96-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Two Lines Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 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
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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