A Voice for Independent Authors

“You can kill a book quicker by your silence than by a bad review.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri

REVIEWING TODAY: WORTHY OF THIS GREAT CITY BY MIKE MILLER

The narrator of Worthy of This Great City by Mike Miller wants the reader to know from the start that he is one arrogant asshole. Not my words – his. He spends the prologue avoiding any specifics about the intent of his story, but he does clarify in great and glaring attitudinal detail his own ingrained hatred, or at least disdain, for pretty much every member of the human race. He is pathological about his cynicism, but equitable as well. What the portent of this might be eludes the entrapped reader, who remains ambivalent but curious regarding the impending plot of this book, and who is, in the meantime, also made aware of an extreme literary intelligence behind the character’s (a journalist’s) attitude and his prior historical development, presumably similar to that of the great city in which he resides and works: Philadelphia.

Mike Miller is an acutely astute observer of individual people, especially of their personal foibles and affectations, but he is also a detailed witness to his daily physical surroundings, which lends to the already generously provided and often verbally exquisite descriptive phrases in Worthy of This Great City a certain “gravitas” normally ascribed to serious, if heartless, individuals. One should not expect explosive plot development in this book. Nor much heart. Rather, the reader should plan to let an ever-elusive plotline develop naturally over time, and he should appreciate in the meantime a somewhat lengthy tour of significant if mundane everyday events – like a city council meeting, where at least for one interesting interlude a person obligingly keels over dead. Like the book, intelligence done cold.