Despite a tendency to dwell on emotional explanations, Foley delivers a compelling tale.
A debut novel that uses the world of dreams to upend the life of an otherwise ordinary housewife.
Since Rose was 6 years old she has dreamed every night of the same place: a magical island on which the only other person is a boy named Hugo. In her dreams, Hugo and Rose grow into adults at the same rate that Rose grows in real life, but everything else on the island stays much the same, and they adventure blissfully together each time she sleeps. But by the time Rose is a mother with three small children and a surgeon husband who is rarely home, she starts to resent her waking life. On the island, she's still svelte, energetic, and happy—her best self. At home, she's overweight, overworked, and overtired. On a particularly rough day, when nothing is going well, she chances upon Hugo in the real world. Like Rose, this version of Hugo bears the markings of real life—he is older, paunchy, and has glasses. But Rose knows it’s him and soon he knows it’s her, as well. The two discover that the dreams have been shared all along. A more pastoral-minded author might take this twist in its obvious, romantic direction, but Foley makes it clear that there will be no easy way out of this surprising clash of lives; both Rose’s dreams and her waking life take on dark, unsettling elements. None of the adults in this book—Hugo, Rose, or Rose’s husband, Josh—behave particularly thoughtfully or well, which contributes high drama but makes them difficult to root for. Rose, especially, is a character that things happen to, even on the island, and her lack of agency is frustrating. But the island itself is a strikingly believable dreamscape, and the passages that take place there have a satisfying flavor.
Despite a tendency to dwell on emotional explanations, Foley delivers a compelling tale.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05579-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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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