Not a bad soap opera, some nicely drawn characters and a sharp bitter edge, but rambling: takes much too long to cut to the...
Coming-of-age tale by second-novelist Fromm (How All This Started, 2000, etc.), this about the rocky adolescence of a feisty Montana girl with an absent dad and floozy mom.
Lucy Diamond, a high-school freshman, has just overdosed on her own hormones and is intent on getting whatever she can out of life as soon as she possibly can. She has a boyfriend named Kenny, a nice enough kid who lives with his divorced mother and sees his own father even less than Lucy sees hers. He takes—or, rather, he’s offered—Lucy’s virginity, but theirs is more an alliance of kindred souls than of ardent lovers. Both are equally disillusioned with their parents, who seem entirely incapable of offering anything remotely resembling a good example to their children: Lucy’s father lives on the road and thinks his responsibilities to his wife and daughter can be fulfilled with a regular check in the mail; Lucy’s mother lectures her daughter about venereal diseases while seeing other men on the sly, and Kenny’s father is a drunk. Kenny’s mother freaks when she discovers that Lucy and her son are having sex, and she connives to have Kenny’s custody transferred to his father to get him away from her. Disgusted and vaguely heartbroken, Lucy responds to Kenny’s exile by sleeping with the first boy she can find—and, no surprise, he turns out to be an insensitive thug. Eventually, fate deals her the kindest hand possible under the circumstances when her mother abandons her to run off to Mexico with some guy while Lucy’s father is in Canada. Left on her own, Lucy begins to take some responsibility for her life. Too bad she couldn’t give lessons to the grownups.
Not a bad soap opera, some nicely drawn characters and a sharp bitter edge, but rambling: takes much too long to cut to the chase.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-30775-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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