A fine tale about the highlights and pitfalls of first love.
Young love takes a beating, or at least a spirited whisking.
Aspiring chef Eric and Anna, a Welsh management intern, both 20, cross paths when she walks into the restaurant where he works. Soon after, they begin an affair beautifully and sensuously described by debut author Christopher. All is passion, playfulness and innocence, and the romance is fully developed with all the accompanying intimacies, joys and missteps. But all is not well. Eric’s confession that he fathered a child and gave it up for adoption disturbs Anna, whose childhood was hardly idyllic either. Abruptly, she announces, the first of many times, that she doesn’t want to see him anymore. Despite her misgivings, the two reconcile, marry and move to Eric’s home state of Oregon and later travel to Wales. But the relationship experiences serious bumps, and Eric returns alone to the States. Over six years, the two part and reunite, only to split again, throughout such diverse settings as the Pacific Northwest, Miami and New York. Whenever Anna calls or appears, Eric quickly caves, abandons his plans and puts his career at risk in the hope of recapturing the magic of their early days together. Their on-again, off-again relationship is so realistically portrayed that, after a few breakups, it becomes agonizingly predictable. Although Anna and Eric pursue their respective careers, they are never fully defined in their relationship to the world; at times both come off as painfully self-absorbed. But perhaps it’s relationship absorption, as if their true intercourse is a journey in and out of the youthful fantasy of love. The novel ends on an upbeat note, delivering a sense of relief that the ball lobbed back and forth between the two is at rest. Eric is left with a deep appreciation of his first great passion and recognition of the one with whom he will share a table for two.
A fine tale about the highlights and pitfalls of first love.Pub Date: March 12, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4392-1972-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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
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