Light and sweet as a bonbon, this little confection of a book is delicious.
Can the gift of a perfect book transform a person’s life?
Juliette, a whimsical Parisian, leads a life far too dull for her magical spirit. She has an ordinary office job in real estate and dates men who are positively yawnworthy. Her love of literature and her active imagination, however, set her on a path to becoming a matchmaker between books and readers. Juliette lives in an almost-alternate reality where passengers on the Métro are actually reading paper books rather than texting friends, swiping Tinder, or even reading e-books. She is intrigued by the man in the green hat who makes his way through an entomology textbook and the hopeless romantic who sobs at page 247 of every book she reads. One morning, Juliette instinctively exits the Métro a few stops early on her commute to find herself at the quirky Books Unlimited, where she meets Soliman and his young daughter, Zaide. There, she is recruited as a book passeur; her mission is to follow strangers and observe their lives in order to give them the gift of the perfect book for that moment in their lives. Part charming stalker, part literary pharmacist, Juliette is more fulfilled as passeur than real estate agent and dives deeper into this secret realm of bibliophilic cupids. With a cast of characters reminiscent of the French film Amélie, Féret-Fleury creates a world that is delightful and enchanting. As she flits about this new universe, Juliette discovers that the life she may change the most is her own. This is the author's first book to appear in English, and it's been deftly translated to maintain the lyrical writing of the original French text.
Light and sweet as a bonbon, this little confection of a book is delicious.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-31542-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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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