Review by Booklist Review
Who are the atavists? Millet's intriguing throwbacks are identified by the title of each tale in this Venn diagram--like collection, similar in structure and sharing the Los Angeles setting of her last volume of stories, Fight No More (2018). In "Tourist," a woman is flummoxed by the cyber world, where her 14-year-old son is utterly at home, but when he's in despair, she knows the body and the earth will provide the cure. In "Fetishist," a high-school senior abruptly marries a young, ambitious DACA recipient, her brilliant brother is derailed after studying at Stanford, and someone is viewing weird web porn. In "Artist," the older daughter is all about profit, while her younger sister finds her calling helping elders at a care facility use their smartphones. "Terrorist" brings neighbors together, including a gay couple and a family of Somali immigrants. With her sharply honed perspective on our digital bewitchment and destruction of nature, her shredding wit and depthless compassion, Millet deftly portrays individuals of different generations caught in tech-sparked predicaments absurd, heartbreaking, and enraging. These thought-provoking, surprising, charming, and deeply moving stories illuminate who we are at our core even as our lives are mediated by social media, dating apps, and surveillance cameras, even as the living world is being driven precipitously toward extinction.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Millet (A Children's Bible) delivers a crystalline and mordantly funny linked story collection about a web of friends and neighbors in Southern California. In "Tourist," divorced mom Trudy gets her kicks by "courting her own disgust" via scrolling her phone for cringy updates from a former friend turned "wife guy." She also marvels at the disconnect between her friend Amy's curated online world (jet-skiing with the fam) and trouble at home, which Trudy discovers over drinks with Amy. "Fetishist" follows Amy's husband, Buzz, as he discovers geriatric porn in the family computer's browser history, which he deduces was viewed by his live-in son-in-law, Luis. He commits a "major tactical error" by telling Amy, who, instead of sharing a laugh with him as he'd expected, pressures him to confront Luis. In "Gerontologist," a recent high school graduate volunteers in a nursing home, where an elderly resident tells her about having sex with a fellow resident, who has dementia, on his "lucid days." Millet's cutting dialogue is as sharp as ever (Amy "needs to invest in some Spanx. Like, yesterday," claims a cruel friend of her daughter's in "Dramatist"), and the stories end with surprising and moving insights into her characters' deepest fears and desires. The author is at the top of her game. (Apr.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A group of characters in Los Angeles face climate crisis and existential angst in 14 interconnected short stories. Two families stand at the center of Millet's lovely, keening tales: Buzz, Amy, and their children Liza and Nick; and single mother Helen with daughters Mia and Shelley. They are well-educated, middle-class, liberal Americans, appalled by the state of their country and, in the case of the parents, bemused by their children. The younger generation "seemed to be void of ideology. Beyond naming and shaming each other for perceived identity bias," comments Trudy, another character who turns up in several stories. This isn't entirely true of Liza, who impulsively married a "DACA kid," Luis, while still in high school, or Nick, a Stanford grad enraged by Americans' complacency in the face of the "five-alarm emergency" of climate catastrophe and impending global extinction. "What we need," he tells his therapist, "is a worldwide revolution. Yesterday." Nonetheless, he's stocking shelves in a big-box store and bartending in a gay bar, and his attitude of "what can I do?" is shared by most of Millet's wonderfully human, believably flawed characters. A few creeps turn up--there's one in "Pastoralist," about a man who preys on vulnerable women, and another in "Cultist," where Shelley's smug boyfriend, Jake, spouts "pieces of pat received wisdom from business school" to her amused mother and the horrified Nick, who has become Mia's boyfriend over the course of the stories. But generally, the author is gentle with confused, well-meaning people immobilized by the scope of the apocalypse they see looming. As she did in such novels asDinosaurs (2022) andA Children's Bible (2020), Millet blends a blunt assessment of our refusal to deal with the ecological catastrophes we have created and a tender portrait of human beings with all their foibles. Sharply observed, beautifully rendered, and heartbreaking. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
