The increasing tension and outlandishness of Stephens’ work lends itself to a poignant take on the topic of family.
A biting critique of identity that lampoons genetic ties and ethnic stereotypes.
Debut novelist Stephens begins her story in Seoul, South Korea, where best friends and fellow Korean-American adoptees Mindy and Lisa have gone to find their birthparents with the help of the MotherFinders agency. Lisa is ambivalent about her heritage and too reliant on Mindy to fill the void left by an absentee adoptive father. Lisa struggles with the fact that “the adopted child is a lie, her family a fiction,” and one of the only ways she finds solace is by writing; Mindy suggested long ago that Lisa become a writer, but Lisa hasn’t yet found a way to make it her profession. As the book begins, the two friends are having a falling out over Lisa's partying, and Mindy kicks Lisa out of their hotel room. Lisa continues hanging out with Harrison, the MotherFinders’ uber-handsome fixer, who tricks her into traveling with him. The story takes a strange turn. Lisa is kidnapped and wakes up a prisoner in an extravagant compound, “the captive of a lunatic." She meets a cast of unusual international characters, several of whom look to be plastic surgery test cases; her captor forces her to change her appearance and records her every move. Stephens intersperses each chapter with quotes from famous adoptees, and Lisa’s fixation on the physical characteristics of race and identity twist the idea of ancestry like a fun-house mirror. “Was I, all along, someone else?” Lisa wonders, as she finally meets her mother, the surgically altered and cartoonish Honey LeBaron. Lisa learns that the heavily-surveilled compound is in North Korea, but the bigger surprise is her mother’s revelation about Lisa’s family line. Lisa re-evaluates everything she thought she knew about herself as she tries to unravel “the enigma of Honey, the anti-mother who had reached across the years and the continents to drag me back to her stone-hearted bosom,” and she plots her escape from her mother's lavish, bizarre prison. “I didn’t love her,” she says, ultimately confronting the darkness in herself, “but I recognized her, as familiar to me as my own self.”
The increasing tension and outlandishness of Stephens’ work lends itself to a poignant take on the topic of family.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-944700-74-4
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Unnamed Press
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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