This honest, mature look at life and love adds to a growing body of evidence leading to a decisive verdict: Ciment is an...
Two sequestered jurors on a tabloidworthy Florida murder trial tumble into an impassioned, illicit affair in this engaging, empathetic novel.
In a jury holding room, waiting to be called into the courtroom for a voir dire, two prospective jurors, identified for most of the book only as C-2 and F-17, begin a flirtation that rapidly grows into a full-blown love affair. C-2 is a 52-year-old female photographer of some renown. Having shot portraits for magazines like Rolling Stone and Interview early in her career, she eventually concluded she was interested in people not as individuals but as a species, and she turned her lens to other subjects, such as war and animals. C-2 is married to a much older man, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who is now 85. Their once-ardent relationship has evolved, and she is increasingly aware of the toll time is taking on their lives and bodies. Now, intensely attracted to F-17, a professor of anatomy in his early 40s with a pitted complexion, piercing blue eyes, and “beautiful feet,” C-2 finds herself hoping for “one last dalliance before she gets too old.” As the affair plays out against a backdrop of a gruesome, sad, and unsettling murder trial (a teenage girl stands accused of killing her toddler brother, but is the real culprit her twin sister?) and the shabby Econo Lodge accommodations and unappetizing luncheonette meals the court has arranged for the jurors during their sequestration, C-2, as both a lover and a juror, must weigh issues of guilt and innocence, loyalty and betrayal, life and death, passion and compassion. Ciment (Act of God, 2015, etc.) lays out the plot—part love story, part whodunit, part coming-of-old-age tale—with gentle sensitivity and straightforward intelligence, approaching complex emotions and conflicting loyalties as might a good juror: observing her characters’ behavior with an open mind and heart, an ability to consider context and varied perspectives, an appreciation for the evidence, and a notable lack of judgment.
This honest, mature look at life and love adds to a growing body of evidence leading to a decisive verdict: Ciment is an author well worth reading.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4798-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.
Another reboot of Jane Austen?!? Hadlow pulls it off in a smart, heartfelt novel devoted to bookish Mary, middle of the five sisters in Pride and Prejudice.
Part 1 recaps Pride and Prejudice through Mary’s eyes, climaxing with the humiliating moment when she sings poorly at a party and older sister Elizabeth goads their father to cut her off in front of everyone. The sisters’ friend Charlotte, who marries the unctuous Mr. Collins after Elizabeth rejects him, emerges as a pivotal character; her conversations with Mary are even tougher-minded here than those with Elizabeth depicted by Austen. In Part 2, two years later, Mary observes on a visit that Charlotte is deferential but remote with her husband; she forms an intellectual friendship with the neglected and surprisingly nice Mr. Collins that leads to Charlotte’s asking Mary to leave. In Part 3, Mary finds refuge in London with her kindly aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner. Mrs. Gardiner is the second motherly woman, after Longbourn housekeeper Mrs. Hill, to try to undo the psychic damage wrought by Mary’s actual mother, shallow, status-obsessed Mrs. Bennet, by building up her confidence and buying her some nice clothes (funded by guilt-ridden Lizzy). Sure enough, two suitors appear: Tom Hayward, a poetry-loving lawyer who relishes Mary’s intellect but urges her to also express her feelings; and William Ryder, charming but feckless inheritor of a large fortune, whom naturally Mrs. Bennet loudly favors. It takes some maneuvering to orchestrate the estrangement of Mary and Tom, so clearly right for each other, but debut novelist Hadlow manages it with aplomb in a bravura passage describing a walking tour of the Lake District rife with seething complications furthered by odious Caroline Bingley. Her comeuppance at Mary’s hands marks the welcome final step in our heroine’s transformation from a self-doubting wallflower to a vibrant, self-assured woman who deserves her happy ending. Hadlow traces that progression with sensitivity, emotional clarity, and a quiet edge of social criticism Austen would have relished.
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-12941-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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