A thoughtful psychological analysis of friendship and aging that’s as appetizing as the included recipes.
Round two (after The Legacy, 2006) in the continuing friendship of a 60-something foursome.
When the story opens, Lily, the stalwart of the group, has been dead for nearly a year, leaving her old friends to shape their lives in the wake of great loss. Readers who missed Episode 1–in which this Atlanta-based senior clique came into being–needn’t worry about catching up on the characters’ histories, as Green frequently excerpts verbatim large tracts from The Legacy. Even under the guise of narrative flashbacks, such self-plagiarism would be much better served by concise synopses of relevant relational data–especially since the continuation of this soap opera stands on its own. While a life well-lived–the so-called “legacy” of the first novel–recurs as a major theme, here the characters discover that it may take the death of a loved one to jolt the living into ordering their lives. Janet, the dysfunctional shrink, learns to separate more from her toxic bipolar daughter and gains the courage to enjoy her new relationship with her partner, Alice. Suzanne realizes that her current love interest just isn’t meeting her sexual needs and finds a different kind of self-fulfillment in caring for her grandsons. When she encounters a major health issue, Monica, who loses 60 pounds, finds her relationship with Josh, her “hunk-a-hunk-a-burnin’ love,” stronger than ever. Norm, Lily’s former caretaker and her replacement in the group, undergoes the most significant transformation, settling for nothing less than a fully committed relationship with a man and admitting that he needs to seek out the family that abandoned him as a child. Though 14 months pass before the four rekindle the intensity of their friendship, they come to learn that, while adequately content apart, they complete each other as a group.
A thoughtful psychological analysis of friendship and aging that’s as appetizing as the included recipes.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 0-978-52773-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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
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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