High-toned escape with palatable preaching and beautiful scenery.
Ghosts of the Spanish settlers and lingering effects of the Manhattan Project pleasantly spook the atmosphere in a New Mexican family drama.
The landscape is purple and tan, the humidity low, the manors adobe, but the family dynamics are as realistically complex and, well, cozy as one of those nice Aga sagas that the Brits ship over by the ton. Morrow (Giovanni’s Gift, 1997, etc.) sets the ghost of Dona Francisca de Pena, free-spirited 18th-century descendent of the Conquistadors, floating (but not meddling) around the family acres in greater Santa Fe, where, gradually fading, she observes the lives of her own offspring, the Montoyas, and is herself occasionally sighted. The Montoyas are mostly unpretentious ranchers, horse people whose common sense is badly needed by the Anglos who wander into their pastures. Most of the needy non-grandees have connections to the Ur-techies who came in the ’40s to test the limits of atomic theory. Kip Calder and Brice McCarthy had physicist fathers and shared a Los Alamos boyhood and friendship that soured in the ’60s when Kip skipped out on his pregnant girlfriend, who wound up marrying Brice. Kip went to Southeast Asia and became a spook; Brice went to law school and became a liberal cliché. Now Kip, dying from cancer, has returned, and Ariel Rankin, his abandoned daughter, herself pregnant from a broken affair, has at last responded to feelers Kip put out at a reunion with Brice three years earlier. Kip, nursed from near-death at Sarah Montoya’s nursing home, has become part of the family, but when Ariel reaches New Mexico and picks up her father’s trail, he has disappeared on a last adventure with plucky widower Delfino Montoya to reclaim the ranch the feds snatched for their proving ground. Subplots abound, including an actress trapped in a character she created, until everything knits up as tidy as Twelfth Night.
High-toned escape with palatable preaching and beautiful scenery.Pub Date: June 3, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03095-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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