Technically ambitious, but not a story otherwise out of the ordinary.
Standard coming-of-age debut set amid a 1979 murder spree of African-American children.
Part One, third person: Tasha is the kind of fifth-grader who practices jumping rope all summer long so she can run with the popular jump-ropers once school starts again. So the story begins, along with some revelations about Tasha’s parents’ marriage, but all is eclipsed as the news of the murders of local children takes its place at the center of conversation. Other kids quickly adopt the tragedy as a weapon of threat toward one other, but all the fuss doesn’t divert Tasha from worrying about whether she’ll be invited to the big sleepover or whether Jashante, her love interest, will eat M&Ms with her in the magical way. Then another little boy disappears. Part Two, second person and a switch over to Rodney (one of the weirdest kids in Tasha’s class) for more elementary-school adventures as the investigation goes on. Most of the victims are boys, so Rodney wonders why his parents aren’t more concerned about the danger than about beating him for his grades, particularly Father, who thinks he’s hurt only Rodney’s feelings after beating him in public. Part Three, first person, and Tasha’s pal Octavia’s big problem is that her mother lies to her about things like the Easter Bunny and hypodermic needles. And now Rodney has turned up missing as well. Octavia’s mother’s boyfriend is careless with drugs, and Octavia gets her period (“It wasn’t a big deal”). Speculation ensues that the murders are an effort to eliminate the black man, and it’s a black man—Octavia’s father—who calls one day just as the plot starts to thin. Rodney turns up dead, and it becomes clear that the proximity of death has been a metaphor for the difficulty of those eking out their lives amidst an anonymous air of danger.
Technically ambitious, but not a story otherwise out of the ordinary.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2002
ISBN: 0-446-52830-7
Page Count: 280
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
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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