Red Dog Farm

February 1, 2025
As in his much-lauded debut, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven (2021), Miller explores unusual characters in remote places. The narrator, Orri, the son of farmers in rural Iceland, takes a break from university and leaps into helping his idiosyncratic father with his unusual farming techniques (with a wonderfully lovable dog as companion) in the most unforgiving of environments. While farming, Orri realizes his father is sinking into a depression, but as well as helping his father, he also wishes to please his academic mother, and he senses that she wants him back at school. Orri's mother feels like an outsider in Iceland as a Lithuanian Jewish woman, prejudice that her formidable mother, Amma, a pulmonologist, brazenly and admirably deals with. While at home, Orri learns more about his family and a lot about farming; Milller focuses intently on the daily challenges, drudgery, and beauty found in working the land. Orri meets Mihan online, and an intense digital relationship with her ensues. In this fascinating character study, Miller gives each character room to breathe and develop as the story builds to a mesmerizing conclusion.

COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from February 15, 2025
A young Icelandic man chooses between his home and the wider world. Orri attends the University of Iceland in Reykjav�k, but he's an unfocused and lackluster student, so he finagles permission to take three weeks off from his studies to help his father on the family's farm. It's hard work in a land of plenty: plenty of rain, sleet, snow, and ice. Plenty of muck and mud and bitter cold. Plenty of freezing livestock and cows shitting in their water troughs. Not plenty of topsoil to raise crops on the rocky ground. Orri enjoys the work, but his father, his Pabbi, is a frustrated man who "experienced life as a slow leak." Mamma is a first-generation Jewish immigrant and a professor at Bifr�st University who doesn't want the farm life. Meanwhile, Orri meets women online. He has no romantic chances with R�na, a lesbian who speculates about Orri being her public beard. And he spends countless cyber hours chatting with Amihan Cruz, a woman of Philippine descent: "There is much for good friends to catch up on when they've only just met." So, the characters all have different interests that may or may not blend together. Does Orri really want to quit university and follow in Pabbi's footsteps? "Because who in their right mind--I'm looking at you, Vikings--would take their first steps onto our steaming black rock and thinkfarmland?" That Orri thinks so is evident from the prologue, so it's no spoiler. He's a thoughtful and expressive narrator, who refers to "moments you know you'll recall in perfect clarity forever, seared across the neurons like a psychic tattoo." Some of those vivid moments are ankle-deep in muck, and some are of animal slaughter, because "a real working farm isn't a tourist attraction." But many more are of friendships, family, and the land itself. This is Miller's second novel of the far north, followingThe Memoirs of Stockholm Sven (2021), and he clearly knows his subject. An engaging read from start to finish.

COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.