Lovely writing wrapped around an often unpalatable core.
A family in a remote lighthouse comes under the spell of an unusual woman and her even more unusual daughter.
The Borya brothers are young when the five of them, and their impoverished parents, move from their shack near a fishing village to take over an isolated lighthouse. Eventually, Osip, a middle brother, becomes the lighthouse keeper; Sevastian-Benedikt, the oldest, hunts and traps to keep them alive. As time passes and a tragedy reduces their number, Sevastian takes up with Noé, a strange woman who lives in a small cabin apart from the rest of the family. Though Noé is Sevastian’s woman and bears him a number of children who run wild through the rugged landscape where they live, Osip is nevertheless obsessed with her, and the two begin sleeping together. Noé rarely speaks, and she has little to do with the children she births. She knows the land and the animals intimately: She can skin whales, handle jellyfish. Noé and Sevastian’s daughter, Mie, has a similar talent, able to cast her mind into the bodies of other creatures (and sometimes inanimate objects) to fuse her consciousness with animals and explore the world. At 12, Mie now wants to understand humans better and turns her attention toward what seems most natural: sex. This is Wilhelmy’s third novel, though the first to be translated into English, and she is a meticulous recorder of the dramatic wilderness of what seems to be coastal Quebec. But her desire to show readers how, left to their own devices, humans will behave in the amoral ways that nature produces in the animal kingdom seems to betray a deep cynicism. And Wilhelmy’s detached look at incest and child sexuality may leave many readers cold.
Lovely writing wrapped around an often unpalatable core.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4870-0610-5
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Arachnide/House of Anansi Press
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.
An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).
Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.Pub Date: April 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.
Eleven years ago, he broke her heart. But he doesn’t know why she never forgave him.
Toggling between past and present, two love stories unfold simultaneously. In the first, Macy Sorensen meets and falls in love with the boy next door, Elliot Petropoulos, in the closet of her dad’s vacation home, where they hide out to discuss their favorite books. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. And as a teen, Macy has more to worry about than which girl Elliot is taking to the prom. After losing her mother at a young age, Macy is navigating her teenage years without a female role model, relying on the time-stamped notes her mother left in her father’s care for guidance. In the present day, Macy’s father is dead as well. She throws herself into her work and rarely comes up for air, not even to plan her upcoming wedding. Since Macy is still living with her fiance while grappling with her feelings for Elliot, the flashbacks offer steamy moments, tender revelations, and sweetly awkward confessions while Macy makes peace with her past and decides her future.
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2801-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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