Lyrical and breezy. A story about the power of friendships and the importance of savoring life’s simple blessings.
The charming second installment of Vaite’s Tahitian trilogy.
When we last saw Materena Mahi, on the island of Tahiti (in Frangipani, Feb. 2006), her children were grown and starting lives of their own. Vaite turns the clock back a decade or so here, reflecting on the time when this matriarch was building her family. The title refers to the legendary tree that provides nourishment for Tahitian families when money is scarce. With the help of the breadfruit tree, Materena finds there’s always enough food to satisfy her family. Money may be tight in Materena’s home, but there’s an abundance of love and strong opinions—even the children are sassy. The story follows Materena and Pito, her longtime partner and lover, as they ponder marriage, tackle parenting and try to cope with intrusive, yet well-meaning family members who surround them in their small island home. Materena is obsessed with love—be it weddings, love songs or love stories—and she longs to feel appreciated and admired by her man. Tired of merely being Pito’s woman, Materena won’t rest until Pito recognizes their union in a meaningful way. Vaite explores the meaning of marriage and the value of living free from society’s expectations, once again transporting her readers to a faraway land where family comes first and where there’s always time to stop and share. Materena is a patient listener, always giving the storyteller her undivided attention, and for this reason, all the best stories from the “coconut radio” (island gossip) make their way to her ears. The recanted island legends and family lore can be a bit rambling at times, but Materena embraces each gossip session with an open mind and open heart.
Lyrical and breezy. A story about the power of friendships and the importance of savoring life’s simple blessings.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2006
ISBN: 0-316-01658-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Back Bay/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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