A genre- (and gender-) bending take on the classic Western.
A young woman in an alternate version of the 1890s American West joins a gang of outlaws.
Ada is just a teenager living in the Independent Town of Fairchild when she’s married off and expected to start a family with her new husband. The daughter of the town’s midwife, Ada knows just about all there is to know about childbirth and childbearing—except the reasons behind the failure to conceive, the worst fate that can befall a woman in her society. (The standard punishment for a “barren” woman is to be hanged as a witch.) When she herself cannot get pregnant, Ada must leave her mother and young sisters behind, first fleeing to a convent. Then, when she becomes dissatisfied by the limitations to her learning that convent life dictates, she is directed by the Mother Superior to the Hole in the Wall Gang. Well known as robbers in “the territories,” the gang is led by the mysterious Kid, a figure said to be as “tall as a pine tree and as strong as a grizzly bear.” But when Ada is secreted to their hideout, she finds none of the outlaws, least of all the Kid, are what they seem. North has smashed two unlikely genres together here: the dystopian alternate history and the Western. Calling it The Handmaid’s Tale crossed with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid goes some way to describe the novel’s memorable world, but it is also wholly its own. It earns its place in the growing canon of fiction that subverts the Western genre by giving voice to the true complexity of gender and sexual expression, as well as race relations, that has previously been pushed to the margins of traditional cowboy or westward expansion tales.
A genre- (and gender-) bending take on the classic Western.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63557-542-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.
A processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal.
Marcos Tejo is the boss’s son. Once, that meant taking over his father’s meat plant when the older man began to suffer from dementia and require nursing home care. But ever since the Transition, when animals became infected with a virus fatal to humans and had to be destroyed, society has been clamoring for a new source of meat, laboring under the belief, reinforced by media and government messaging, that plant proteins would result in malnutrition and ill effects. Now, as is true across the country, Marcos’ slaughterhouse deals in “special meat”—human beings. Though Marcos understands the moral horror of his job supervising the workers who stun, kill, flay, and butcher other humans, he doesn’t feel much since the crib death of his infant son. “One can get used to almost anything,” he muses, “except for the death of a child.” One day, the head of a breeding center sends Marcos a gift: an adult female FGP, a “First Generation Pure,” born and bred in captivity. As Marcos lives with his product, he gradually begins to awaken to the trauma of his past and the nightmare of his present. This is Bazterrica’s first novel to appear in America, though she is widely published in her native Argentina, and it could have been inelegant, using shock value to get across ideas about the inherent brutality of factory farming and the cruelty of governments and societies willing to sacrifice their citizenry for power and money. It is a testament to Bazterrica’s skill that such a bleak book can also be a page-turner.
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982150-92-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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