A stunning fantasy debut.
Lay’s debut novel recounts the story of a writer and the fantasy world he’s struggling to create.
Half of this book details the life of Jack Ampong, a frustrated author who’s trying to write a Tolkien-esque fantasy novel, composed of several interconnected short stories. He quit working as an analytics manager to write full time while his wife, Sarah D’Albero-Ampong, a former artist, supports them financially by making sports collectibles, which puts a strain on their marriage. The narrative moves back and forth between the two and includes newspaper articles, text messages, Facebook posts, and more. These tell stories of such things as Sarah’s stellar high school basketball career and details about Jack’s writing difficulties. The other half of the novel is comprised of Jack’s fantasy tales, replete with maps and fictional histories. In this world, elflike people with short life spans hold their people’s collective memories in a “Memory Tree.” There are also sorcerers, the Cree, whose magic comes at a cost: They can’t have kids. This narrative moves around in time, jumping between various locales and several different characters, including sorcerer/scholar Padgett and a mysterious figure named Benedictus. One story focuses on an aging commander who’s attempting to protect his backwater outpost from an unknown army; another tells of two unlikely detectives searching for a missing prince. The overall, interconnected structure is riveting, as the reader never knows where the story will go next—in either arc. The dual storylines effectively feed off of each other, and various details and character traits make their ways from Jack’s life into his fiction. Moreover, Lay manages to bring the two different strands together at the end in a satisfactory and unexpected way. By the end of the novel, the author impressively creates two vivid worlds, each with its own history and compelling characters, while also offering a meditation on the relationship between creativity, fertility, and shared memory.
A stunning fantasy debut.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-7321035-0-4
Page Count: 419
Publisher: Gowanus Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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