A bittersweet coming-of-age drama and a portrait of an era.
Once young and in love and destined for greatness, a pair of recent college grads find themselves dangerously unraveling at the dawn of the 2008 financial crisis in Pitoniak’s energetic debut.
Julia Edwards and Evan Peck fall in love freshman year at Yale. He’s a small-town boy from rural Canada at Yale on a hockey scholarship; she’s a gorgeous prep-school grad from suburban Boston at Yale because that’s where people like her are destined to be. After four (mostly) blissful years of undergrad, the pair moves to New York City, sharing an apartment on the Upper East Side. But almost immediately, the relationship begins to show cracks. Evan is working round the clock as a first-year associate at an ultraprestigious hedge fund; Julia’s floundering, the only one of her friends to graduate wholly without a path. Eventually, through family connections, she gets an assistant position at an arts nonprofit, the main advantage of which is that it is better than nothing. As the markets continue to tank, Julia and Evan drift further and further apart, each of them consumed by a different, sinister game. Evan is tapped to work on a top-secret deal that may not be exactly what it seems, while Julia reconnects with a rakish college pal who seems to offer her access to the life she’d always imagined. Though their paths have catastrophically diverged, both Julia and Evan are facing versions of the same all-too-recognizable post-collegiate crisis: what happens when you aren’t the person you thought you were? Pitoniak expertly captures both the excitement and the oppressive darkness of being young and at sea in New York City, the unsettlingly thin line between freedom and free fall. And while the novel isn’t always subtle in its revelations, it’s deeply empathetic—and always engaging.
A bittersweet coming-of-age drama and a portrait of an era.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-35417-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Lee Boudreaux/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
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 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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