Mary Miller’s The Last Days of California is a quiet epic, the sort you kind of stumble into, and then get stuck—out of pure fascination, and something akin to nostalgia. It’s also the type of novel that feels familiar, harkening to a time, and certain feelings you may have forgotten about in the process of growing up. Fifteen-year-old Jess, her older, darkly glamorous, rebel sister, Elise, and their parents, set out on a road trip to California because the world is ending, and their father believes that the Second Coming is very near. Urged by their evangelical father to distribute tracts to nonbelievers everywhere they go, Jess is subjected to a litany of Waffle Houses and McDonald’s, long stretches of dry, dusty land, and the unfortunate realization that something may be amiss.

Miller writes in quick, decisive language. She is able to capture, completely, the lonesome feelings of a teenage girl, the sisterly squabbles that perpetually erupt in backseats with too little A.C. and not enough legroom, and a child’s realization that parents are just as human, and just as wrong, as the rest of us. From contraband beers, to boys at late nights, to keeping secrets, Miller’s prose is rife with a specific kind of adolescent longing that gnaws at the insides. It is uncomfortable, it is unabashedly honest, and it is beautifully real.

Miller deftly peppers the story with subtle asides—the plight of eating fast food daily, the pros and cons to hamburgers, and the crazy, breathtaking sensation one feels after texting a new boy, for the first time. The novel is largely centered in the car, as well as various hotels—some nice, some terrible, some with open bars and pink, fruity cocktails. It’s just this sort of description that renders her story, both easily digestible, surface-wise, as well as literarily significant. It’s the kind of writing that sinks in it’s teeth, and stays.

Reviewed by MB Sellers

Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date: 9/2/2014
Pages: 256

Amazon

Barnes and Noble

Book Summary
In Big World, Mary Miller writes about the infinitesimal prisons that we put ourselves in daily. Each story is centered on a young woman, usually in an unsatisfying relationship with both her lover and herself, and an array of beer cans. Her stories are about the small and oftentimes ignored moments that we let slip by us. Young, mindfully foolish women, smoking cigarettes and popping Coors and expressing the great myths of the universe in the bedrooms of their boyfriends: Mary Miller writes the small, devilish truth.

Review
“I wore short skirts and high heels and pantyhose. Pantyhose are expensive. They snagged and ripped but I couldn't bring myself to throw them out. They used to come in eggs but now it was envelopes,” (“Pearl”).

Big World is about no-good, deadbeat love affairs, the small intricacies of the beer can in a well-manicured hand, and the daily trauma of the young woman: in short, it speaks with a modern voice to the modern girl who has ever felt trapped in a life too small for living. Throughout, there’s an array of ex-husbands and boyfriends, drunken, weed-fueled nights, and surprising wisdom caught up in the palpably strange and stale night air that Miller, somehow, creates for us. She uses direct language to tell her tales—there’s no funny business, and yet, each adjective is lovingly placed, obvious and purposeful and strategic. Miller doesn’t lead us on with fanciful turns of phrase; she hits the nail on the head—which is exactly the sort of phrase she’d scorn in one of her stories. Her writing is sharp, acerbic, even, but there’s a bruised heart behind it all. It’s a wisecracking heart, sure, but all the same, it has good stuff to say, and so we listen: “We feed him shots of vodka and amaretto, to catch up, and move him around the apartment like something exquisite we have no place for,” (“Even the Interstate is Pretty”). It’s these tiny snippets of lyricism that really get to you. Miller is the master of female realism—the hard, dirty under-side of things that most people have trouble talking about, let alone recounting. But then she’ll surprise you with a turn of phrase that is so incredibly divine, so lovely, so far ahead of her sad women, like a burning star that you can only hope they find in their own sky.

Reviewed by M.B. Sellers

Book Information
Publisher: Hobart
Publication date: 2/1/2009
Pages: 230

Amazon

Barnes and Noble