A choppy narrative that fails to dovetail either the family’s story with the historical context or the realistic and...
Baker’s third novel (after Once Two Heroes, 2003) is a family saga about three generations of freed African-Americans who work their own land in the English colony of South Carolina.
Jasper Merian has been given his freedom, but is forced to leave his wife and son in Virginia, still enslaved. Before he can hack out part of the Carolinian wilderness as his property, the 29-year-old Merian must do battle with a fearsome creature that haunts the area because it was denied burial. After dealing with the supernatural, the practical Merian acquires a mule and a woman, both necessary for survival. Wife number two bears him a son, Purchase, but is outraged by Merian’s plan to fetch his first wife, Ruth. Fortunately for domestic harmony, his plan fails; Ruth dies a slave, but years later their son Magnus will join Merian at Stonehouses. By now Merian is a prosperous farmer and Purchase a skillful smith who has forged a magical, fortune-telling sword. It will be his outstanding achievement. Soon after he will fall for Mary Josepha, wife of a revivalist preacher, and turn into a lovesick fool, chasing her up North. Later Purchase will ship their small boy Caleum down to Stonehouses. The absentee father creates a big hole in the saga, which offers few of the rewards of the genre as it degenerates into loosely assembled episodes. Slavery flares briefly as an issue when Magnus, Merian’s successor as owner of Stonehouses, is forced to be a temporary slaveowner. The Revolutionary War is handled just as briefly, when the now grown Caleum fights magnificently at Saratoga, where he loses a leg. Recuperating in New York City, he settles down with a waitress, though he has a wife back home. Then, hey presto, he abandons the waitress and returns home, where the ghostly fiend must again be vanquished.
A choppy narrative that fails to dovetail either the family’s story with the historical context or the realistic and supernatural elements.Pub Date: July 10, 2006
ISBN: 0-8021-1829-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
