Readable and clever, this novel might make an easy transition to the movie screen, where stock characters, oblivious parents...
The sadism and smaller cruelties of high school get a workout in this patchy novel, which features violence and bloodshed without a single vampire, werewolf or zombie.
Pittsburgh-area St. Michael’s needs major repairs to its building, staff and traditions as the school year starts in 1991. In the cinematic opening flashback, a tormented boy on the school’s roof topples statues of saints toward kids below. Freshmen confront not just the usual first-year anxieties, but yearlong hazing by seniors. A budding friendship between newbies Peter Davidek and Noah Stein becomes an enduring alliance, despite their shared desire for classmate Lorelei Pascal. She wants to be popular, Peter hopes to survive, but in the smart, fearless Noah, Breznican creates a likable rebel. Born of Jewish and Lutheran parents, his troubled back story includes his mother’s death in a fire that scarred his face and constant fights that lead to being expelled from public school, leaving St. Mike’s his only option. The ineffectual staff includes many St. Mike’s alumni, who tend to abet the hazing they too once suffered or to inflict their own punishments. The exception is the well-intentioned principal, Sister Maria, who battles the insidious pastor, Father Mercedes, a caricature of nastiness (he smokes in church!). The school’s most-powerful person is senior Hannah Kraut, feared by students and staff alike because she has been collecting everyone’s secrets in a notebook that will be aired before graduation. That's an obvious echo of the movie Mean Girls and its “Burn Book,” yet Breznican weaves a much darker tale than Tina Fey’s, one in which there seems to be no limit to the kinds and amount of pain young people will inflict on one another.
Readable and clever, this novel might make an easy transition to the movie screen, where stock characters, oblivious parents and needless repetition are familiar, but today's audiences probably won't go for a look at an era that lacks the viral abuses of cyberbullying.Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-01935-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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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