Heavy on sweet eccentricity and uplift, but what could be a better beach read than mermaids beating Mickey Mouse at his own...
A dreamy, semi-historical novel from Carter (The Orange Blossom Special, 2005, etc.) about a young girl who becomes a performing mermaid at the Weeki Wachee Springs, Fla., tourist venue, in 1970, just as Disney World is cornering the state’s tourism market.
Two years after her father Roy abandons the family, Delores Walker is living in the Bronx with her adored baby brother Westie and their hardworking but embittered mother Gail. For Delores, who has always loved swimming, a trip to watch the mermaid show at Weeki Wachee when she was nine remains a magical memory of family happiness. So at 16 she makes her way to Florida and is soon a star among the performing mermaids. Having all come to Weeki Wachee after being misfits in the real world, the mermaid girls bond into an informal family under the tutelage of tough but loving Thelma Foote. Struggling to keep her clientele as Disney World’s popularity soars, Thelma strikes a deal with a local TV station to use Delores as a weather girl. When Delores saves a child from drowning on-air during a hurricane, she becomes a national celebrity. Roy, who has found peace and his own sense of belonging while working with animals at Hanratty’s Circus outside nearby Sarasota, sees Delores on TV and hesitantly contacts her. They end up working together when Hanratty and Thelma join forces to establish a hugely successful business. Meanwhile, Gail has found a mentor at the magazine where she cleans offices at night. While taking a secretarial course to improve her career options, she reluctantly lets Westie visit Florida, where he joins Delores’s act. When Gail comes to pick up Westie, all four Walkers reunite as a family, at least briefly. Each has found the means to redemption, forgiveness and love.
Heavy on sweet eccentricity and uplift, but what could be a better beach read than mermaids beating Mickey Mouse at his own game.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-56512-492-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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