How the Dead Dream

Starred review from October 8, 2007
Millet proves no less lyrical, haunting or deliciously absurd in her brilliant sixth novel than in her fifth, the acclaimed Oh Pure & Radiant Heart
. As a boy, T. keeps his distance from others, including his loving but vacant parents, preferring to explore his knack for turning a dollar. Before long, he's a wealthy but lonely young real estate developer in L.A. Just after he adopts, on impulse, a dog from the pound, his mother shows up and announces that T.'s father has left her. His mother, increasingly erratic, moves in; meanwhile, T. finally meets and falls in love with Beth, a nice girl who understands him, but a cruel twist of fate soon leaves him alone again. As his mother continues to unravel, T. finds unexpected consolation in endangered animals at the zoo, and he starts breaking into pens after hours to be closer to them. The jungle quest that results, while redolent of Heart of Darkness
and Don Quixote
, takes readers to a place entirely Millet's own, leavened by very funny asides. At once an involving character study and a stunning meditation on loss—planetary and otherwise—Millet's latest unfolds like a beautiful, disturbing dream.

Starred review from January 15, 2008
T. has always accumulated wealth. As a child, it was through paper routes and bogus charity drives; as a college student, it was through stock-market investments; and as an adult, it is by buying land and developing planned communities. He has never let anyone close enough to derail him from his commitment to accumulate. But the vagaries of love unhinge him: his mother's mental degeneration and subsequent indifference to him, the feelings he has for a dog he rescues from the pound, the love-at-first-sight experience with a woman he meets at a party, and the grief at her sudden lossall these things affect T. in a powerful and bizarre way. He becomes obsessed with endangered species and routinely breaks into zoos at night to sleep in wolves' and elephants' paddocks. Award-winning author Millet's ("Oh Pure and Radiant Heart") story culminates with T. tracking an endangered jaguar and coming face to face with the essence of his own being. With wry, brilliant dialog and insightful existential musings, Millet delves deep into the meaning of humanity's destructive connection to nature and the consequences of the extinction of both animals and love. Absorbing and not to be missed; highly recommended.Joy Humphrey, Pepperdine Law Lib., Malibu, CA

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 15, 2007
T. is so devoted to earning money as a Los Angelesbased real-estate developer that he is content withhis antiseptically solitary life until he is unmoored by a cascade of disasters. His mother loses her grip on reality after his fathers abrupt defection. T.s luxury desert subdivision has hastened the demise of an endangered species, and when T. finally falls in love, she, too, is lost. T.s grief blasts open the doors of perception, and he becomes cosmically attuned to the suffering of animals. Strategizing like a solo commando, he breaks into zoos in the dead of night to sit with the animals, many the last in their line. In a work just as startling, powerful, and significant as her brilliantly inventive Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (2005), Millet, a writer of encompassing empathy and imaginative lyricism, and a satirist of great wit and heart, takes readers on an intelligentlyconceived and devastating journey into the heart of extinction. Millets extraordinary leap of a novel warns us that as the splendor and mystery of the natural world is replaced by the human-made, our species faces a lonely and spiritually impoverished future.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)