Biewald offers smooth, accomplished prose, punctuated by emotionally realistic interactions.
A troubled family remakes itself in this moving third novel by Biewald (Bread and Salt, 2005, and Roses Take Practice, 2006).
Angry young pool player Ivy MacKenzie runs away from her Rivertown, Conn., home at the age of 17, leaving behind her sensitive, gawky younger brother, Bryan, and her beautiful mother, Carol. All three are haunted by the death of Johnny MacKenzie, husband, father and Vietnam veteran, who died in an accident years before. The depth of each character’s grief could be explored more intimately, but each presents a compelling portrait of loss: Carol laments the fact that death has made Johnny into a saint, while she has to do the daily tasks of parenting alone; Ivy feels she lost the parent who loved her best; Bryan wonders why his claim to his father comes last. Into the void left by runaway Ivy comes lonely shop teacher Neal, who wants to fix everything. As Ivy travels a bumpy road to Florida with her new boyfriend, Gil, her mother finds love with the teacher, and Bryan grows up and out of Ivy’s shadow. Soon, though, Ivy is abused by her boyfriend, and finds herself pregnant to boot. She finally bolts from the apartment she shares with Gil to work as a waitress in a diner–a situation that leads her into several dark places. When her only friend leaves, she slowly turns to home, but she finds it drastically changed, with Neal installed as stepfather and a family relieved–but angry–to see her again. As the family learns of both Carol’s and Ivy’s pregnancies, the girls’ paths take very different turns. Finally, Gil returns after the birth of his son, Mac. Can Ivy leave him yet again?
Biewald offers smooth, accomplished prose, punctuated by emotionally realistic interactions.Pub Date: July 12, 2006
ISBN: 1-58348-546-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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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