Lyrical, unexpected, and curiously affecting…a story that lodges uneasily in the heart and mind.
They, robots.
This novel's cast of troubled characters may consist largely of robots, but Winter’s (The Twenty-Year Death, 2012, etc.) melancholy family history owes more to the penetrating psychodynamics of Chekhov and Strindberg than to Isaac Asimov’s fantastic tales of artificial men. In sci-fi terms, Winter’s story recalls Ray Bradbury’s thoughtful, emotionally centered work, which was never overly concerned with the “science” half of the equation. In fact, Bradbury’s classic story “I Sing the Body Electric,” which explores the relationship between a robotic grandmother and her charges, strongly parallels Winter's setup: an isolated family of self-aware machines tends to an ailing human in a hazily described, far-flung, post-disaster future in which robots have seemingly become the dominant social force—albeit one with an uneasy relationship to its dwindling population of creators. We meet Barren Cove’s robot masters—fretful, yearning Mary; resentful, bullying Kent; and the monstrous, nihilistic Clark—through their interactions with Mr. Sapien, a new tenant, an older model machine looking for a respite from the rigors of the city. Sapien’s Nick Carraway–esque observations of the family provide an added layer of literary playfulness, but the book’s considerable power derives from its cockeyed yet unflinching confrontations with the power dynamics inherent in emotional bonds, whether between humans, smart machines, or a mixture of the two. Winter’s deft control of voice and canny vagueness about the nuts-and-bolts details of his world (a punk-rock robot bicycle/centaur girl typifies his whimsical take on sci-fi tropes) alternately draws in and unsettles the reader, effectively conveying the novel’s take on the necessity and agony of love and family—it weaves a uniquely dreamy spell, and a lingering one.
Lyrical, unexpected, and curiously affecting…a story that lodges uneasily in the heart and mind.Pub Date: April 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9785-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Emily Bestler/Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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