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THE MANGO SEASON

Standard fare, but nicely seasoned: The spice of atmosphere and geography livens up a family saga and gives a fresh twist to...

A welcome second from Malladi (A Breath of Fresh Air, 2002), who sends a young expatriate back to her family in India and makes her grow up fast.

A bright girl from an ambitious Brahmin family, Priya studied computer science at Texas A&M and has a good job in Silicon Valley. Now on her first visit back to her family in more than seven years, she’s surprised at just how foreign India—with its dirt, heat, and traditions—has become to her. Her family is proud of her accomplishments, but they worry that, at 27, Priya is on the verge of becoming an old maid. She didn’t have the nerve to tell them about Nick Collins, her American fiancé back in San Francisco, so they took matters into their own hands by arranging a marriage for her to Adarsh Sarma, the handsome and very eligible son of a prominent local family. Americanized to look upon arranged marriages as monstrous and absurd, but still Indian enough to find it hard to defy her parents outright, Priya is in a bind. Plus, she thinks Adarsh is a hunk. And Nick has stopped returning her e-mails. Everyone is excited about setting up a double wedding with Priya and her aunt Sowmya (who has been assigned a considerably plainer and less desirable fiancé), and Priya is afraid that the arrangements will soon take on a momentum that can’t be stopped. What to do? Has Nick abandoned her? Is a bird in the hand worth two in the bush? And does Priya really want, deep down, to be an Indian or an American? When there’s no time to sort out your thoughts, you have to go by your gut feelings, even if you can’t justify them.

Standard fare, but nicely seasoned: The spice of atmosphere and geography livens up a family saga and gives a fresh twist to a typical coming-of-age tale.

Pub Date: June 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-345-45030-2

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003

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THE HANDMAID'S TALE

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

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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

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ANIMAL FARM

A FAIRY STORY

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

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