Review by Booklist Review
The protagonists in this slim but powerful short story collection are almost exclusively female: adolescent girls on the cusp of womanhood, daughters of difficult mothers, young women navigating complicated romantic and professional relationships, and mothers consumed with and feeling consumed by their children. Author and filmmaker Miller (Jacob's Folly, 2013) adeptly encapsulates these women's experiences. An overwhelmed mother feels "as ubiquitous as air in this house for my children," while an adolescent girl whose body has developed seemingly overnight "didn't know where she began and ended anymore." All of these perspectives culminate in the title story, in which a mind-melding device that "dissolved the barrier between . . . two people" has resulted in a generation of fragile, doll-like children with arrow-shaped heads and short life spans. A teen abducts her institutionalized younger sister in a naive attempt to give her a "real life" before she dies; later, after the birth of her own daughter, she questions her true motivation. Recommended for fans of Joyce Carol Oates and Never Let Me Go (2005), by Kazuo Ishiguro.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Miller's alluring collection (after the novel Jacob's Folly), protagonists search for connection and pleasure in strange, sometimes destructive ways. Daphne in "Mrs. Covet" is a mother of two, pregnant with a third. The family hires a cleaning lady named Nat, hoping for some order, but after Nat moves in, something disastrous happens. In the speculative title story, people have transcendent phone sex on devices called Total Phones, and the force field of an early version of the phone leads to birth defects (most "Total children" die from unknown causes by the age of eight or nine). Roxanne, 16, hatches a plan to break her younger sister, E, eight, from the Total Care Center where she's lived since her infancy, and devastating consequences ensue. In "She Came to Me," Ciaran, an Irish writer who has remained faithful to his wife of 18 years, struggles with writer's block and decides to seek out everyday stories in Dublin. He meets a young American woman who professes to be a romantic (and admits to having been a stalker). They go to her room, where he has second thoughts about having sex with her, though they do anyway. Miller brings a cinematic eye to her descriptions (a parking garage's "final floor" offers a "vivid sky") and plenty of drama to the situations. These stories are full of surprises. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (July)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Seven stories focus on the many guises of obsessive (though not particularly sexual or romantic) love, and Miller's tone is disarmingly matter-of-fact throughout. The protagonists are mostly women, privileged, if not necessarily wealthy, members of the liberal elite. Their passion often centers around children. The opener, "Mrs. Covet," concerns Daphne, an overwhelmed mother of three, one a newborn, who feels ambivalent about her new nanny; threatened by the nanny's competence, Daphne also luxuriates in her novel freedom from parental responsibility until a crisis awakens her fierce maternal protectiveness. The mother in "Vapors" is taking her 2-year-old for a walk when she runs into an old lover. Memories of various intensely troubled romantic relationships come flooding back, but none can ultimately compare to her emotional connection to her child. The title story hinges on a science-fiction conceit--social networking technology available only to the well-to-do goes terribly wrong, resulting in the birth of morbidly fragile children who spend their brief lives expensively institutionalized--but it becomes an intense exploration of family ties: When a teenager decides to rescue her younger sister from the institution where their well-meaning, quietly distraught parents have placed her, her plans go awry, but the telling is more sweet than bitter. In "I Want You To Know," a case of obsessive motherly love gone fatally wrong acts as a plot pivot, a story within the story about a woman coming to grips with the new rural life she's committed to with her husband. The protagonist in "Receipts" chooses career over family, knowing and accepting the cost. The nature of storytelling is the theme in "She Came to Me," the only story with a male protagonist, one whose need to feed his creativity in a comically dark erotic adventure equals his avowed commitment to his family. Finally, "The Chekhovians" is itself a riff on Chekhov: There's family tragedy, comic class conflict, and an unexpected offer of money. A beautifully constructed, acutely felt, morally honest collection. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
