A fast-paced but emotionally resonant story about the bonds that hold fast when we’re far from home.
A man and his adolescent daughter indulge their status as refugees from American society by fleeing to remote Kathmandu.
It’s not exactly high adventure, but Groner shines a unique light on a remote, exotic land in his self-confident and culturally rigorous debut novel. His tale of a doctor and his beloved daughter takes a modern-day bent on Seven Years in Tibet and shows the country’s turmoil with a palette that is as affectionate as it is startling. The story finds Peter Scanlon, an American cardiologist and long-suffering divorcee, dropping into far-flung Kathmandu Valley with his teenaged daughter Alex in tow. Their back story is a bit convoluted—Peter’s ex-wife is an addict, and Alex has taken on a protective role around her long-suffering father. Peter is in-country to take a year as a physician at a local teaching hospital, but his gig disappears. Instead, he takes on a role at a small local clinic treating the most ravaged of the country’s impoverished citizens. Despite their self-imposed exile, the pair finds comrades. Peter befriends another physician and duels with Mina, a hot-tempered local nurse. Meanwhile, Alex finds an abiding friendship, and possibly more, with Devi, a local girl who vacillates between an interest in Buddhist teachings and a loose connection to the local rebels. Peter also butts heads with a local pimp, forcing him to buy a young girl in order to save her from human traffickers. These struggles accent the abiding love that Peter has for his daughter and his heartache at her emergence into adulthood. “She had started her slow walk away from him, and even in her presence he missed her,” Groner writes. “What he faced now was not her physical mortality but the first of the small, unavoidable deaths that lay before it.” With worse to come, even the most jaded reader will be on the edge of their seats as the author carries the story home.
A fast-paced but emotionally resonant story about the bonds that hold fast when we’re far from home.Pub Date: June 7, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6978-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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