This true-life-inspired account of child abuse from a monstrous mother is well told but painful to read and premature in its...
In this slightly fictionalized memoir, a young girl suffers horrific abuse for years after being scapegoated by her disturbed mother.
When Tuesday is 8 years old, her mother undergoes a severe personality change after a frontal-lobe injury. One day she tells the girl she’s in big trouble (Mama won’t say why), so Tuesday must stand with her face against the wall, all day long, every day. Turning around warrants a beating. As time goes on, Tuesday’s punishments for the unsaid crime grow crueler and more bizarre. Soon she has to wear a mask because Mama is tired of looking at her ugly face. Mama forces her to drink curdled milk and eat leftover scraps from everyone else’s meals—gristle, half-chewed meat, soggy cereal. Tuesday must go to school without underpants, or go unwashed, or with ugly, ill- fitting clothes. Throughout the years of mistreatment, her father’s only intervention is to send Tuesday to her grandmother for the summer; the return of school means more beatings, humiliation, isolation and starvation. When Tuesday fights back, at 15, she’s finally sent to live with her aunt. Byrne (Flashes, 2011) conveys a horrifying story “inspired by true-life experience,” according to the jacket copy, and though it’s well-written, it’s also very hard to take because the prose so vividly and evocatively portrays suffering. Even mild examples retain the underlying horror of her situation, as when her starvation compels her to eat paper: Notebook pages are “sweet and starchy”; construction paper is too bitter and spongy; but she loves the school’s toilet paper—“Without any ink, dye, or glue, it tasted pure, and it had more of the woody, almost nut-like flavor I had grown to love.” Also hard to take is her father’s passiveness, partly because Byrne is too easy on him. He tells Tuesday that intervention “could break up the family” and Mama “wouldn’t be able to take care of herself … she can’t even write a check on her own.” After Daddy dies, Mama becomes a nurse and does just fine, but Byrne merely mentions the change. There’s a curious lack of the real anger—rage, even—that would be expected, and no mention of how Tuesday has (or hasn’t) worked through these experiences as an adult. It’s as if the reader is meant to supply those emotions for the writer. Also, the ending doesn’t quite ring true—unlike nearly all that has gone before.
This true-life-inspired account of child abuse from a monstrous mother is well told but painful to read and premature in its resolution.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-1463690021
Page Count: 328
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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