An intelligent prequel packed with enjoyable Austen references, hampered somewhat by underdeveloped characterization.
A Jane Austen pastiche involving a disgraced young lady, amateur theatricals, and matrimonial machinations.
Disliking her dull lessons, 16-year-old Susan Smithson is more pleased than saddened to be dismissed from school after allowing the music master to kiss her hand. As an orphan possessing a great deal of beauty but no fortune, Susan is dependent on the generosity of her uncle, George Collins, who’s redoubled his determination to make her “thoughtful, quiet and obedient.” At first, things go well: Susan manages to behave, meets some attractive gentlemen, and is given a new gown by a rich widow. The young woman even charms the formidable Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who’s now visiting London. But a further indiscretion with the rakish Mr. Oliver is the last straw, so Susan is sent to Hunsford to stay at the country parsonage of her tiresome uncle, the Rev. William Collins, and her Aunt Charlotte; at least her shy cousin and friend, Alicia, will be there. Lady Catherine is the clergyman’s patroness, and on returning to her country estate, she gives Susan further chances to ingratiate herself. Susan gets to know the local gentry and their set, including Frank Churchill (from Emma), the Johnson family, and their guest, the heiress Miss Richardson. After noticing that Alicia and young Henry Johnson share an attraction, Susan hits upon a scheme to bring them together: putting on a play. Using her skills at reading people and quietly manipulating them, she convinces Henry to hold amateur theatricals. Onstage and off, there’s much life-changing drama—including proposals, an elopement, and a death. Although its events take place sometime after Pride and Prejudice (and include some of that novel’s characters), McVeigh calls her debut a “Jane Austen Prequel” in that it tells the origin story of the title character in Austen’s unfinished work Lady Susan. By the time the latter novel opens, Lady Susan Vernon is a widow in her mid-30s, and although she’s beautiful and charming, she’s a cold, scheming, and shameless seductress. McVeigh introduces a much milder Susan, even if she is manipulative and self-involved. But it isn’t easy for readers to see how she’ll become the older version, as there’s little Austenian character development in these pages. Whatever Susan’s future, McVeigh portrays her as much the same person at the end of this novel as at its beginning—possibly because the young woman has no real obstacles to overcome or any foil to challenge her perceptions. This contrasts with how Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennet is challenged to reconsider her judgments of Mr. Darcy, or how the timid Fanny Price must stand up for herself against Henry Crawford’s determined courtship in Mansfield Park. All Susan has to do is wait out her forced exile from London. Undeniably, though, McVeigh displays a brilliant, spot-on command of Austen’s diction and tone, as well as familiar phrases, as in the observation that “nothing is more fragile than a lady’s good name—for that, once lost, is lost forever.”
An intelligent prequel packed with enjoyable Austen references, hampered somewhat by underdeveloped characterization.Pub Date: June 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-916882-31-7
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Warleigh Hall Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
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
A touching portrait of courage and friendship.
A lifetime of friendship endures many upheavals.
Ellie and Homa, two young girls growing up in Tehran, meet at school in the early 1950s. Though their families are very different, they become close friends. After the death of Ellie’s father, she and her difficult mother must adapt to their reduced circumstances. Homa’s more warm and loving family lives a more financially constrained life, and her father, a communist, is politically active—to his own detriment and that of his family’s welfare. When Ellie’s mother remarries and she and Ellie relocate to a more exclusive part of the city, the girls become separated. They reunite years later when Homa is admitted to Ellie’s elite high school. Now a political firebrand with aspirations to become a judge and improve the rights of women in her factionalized homeland, Homa works toward scholastic success and begins practicing political activism. Ellie follows a course, plotted originally by her mother, toward marriage. The tortuous path of the girls’ adult friendship over the following decades is played out against regime change, political persecution, and devastating loss. Ellie’s well-intentioned but naïve approach stands in stark contrast to Homa’s commitment to human rights, particularly for women, and her willingness to risk personal safety to secure those rights. As narrated by Ellie, the girls’ story incorporates frequent references to Iranian food, customs, and beliefs common in the years of tumult and reforms accompanying the Iranian Revolution. Themes of jealousy—even in close friendships—and the role of the shir zan, the courageous “lion women” of Iran who effect change, recur through the narrative. The heartaches associated with emigration are explored along with issues of personal sacrifice for the sake of the greater good (no matter how remote it may seem).
A touching portrait of courage and friendship.Pub Date: July 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781668036587
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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