An ultimately optimistic and hopeful novel about growing up amid personal and political disarray.
Batterman’s (Because My Name is Mother, 2012, etc.) novel tells the story of a girl growing up in Brooklyn, New York, as upheaval in America mirrors the chaos in her own home.
The book begins with 5-year-old Rachel Cohen on the eve of her parents’ wedding in September 1974. She’s an intuitive young girl, observing the problems of the adults around her while still finding joy in childhood delights. Her aging, anxious grandmother Ruth Cohen bakes delicious cookies; her parents bicker but are loving and kind. Her aunts and uncles live far away, but her favorite, world-traveling uncle, Jake, is a seemingly endless source of happiness. Rachel’s love for Jake is boundless and as she grows older, sometimes oddly sexual; later, she comes to understand that Jake is gay. The shifting political and social environment of America serves as a backdrop to Rachel’s family’s hectic dynamics in the tumult of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. In the midst of it all, she plays with her friends, gets bullied by local kids, and attends parties as a preteen. When Rachel enters early adolescence, she begins to see fractures in her life—her parents’ dissolving marriage; her grandparents moving away to Tucson, Arizona; and Jake’s mysterious sickness. His rapidly deteriorating health forces her to mature years ahead of her peers, and her final, beautiful, and patient letter to a former childhood girlfriend reveals this tremendously. Batterman’s prose is at times disorganized and juvenile in tone, with more than one use of the clichéd phrase “maybe, just maybe.” The initial chapters are a jumble of memories that makes for a confusing beginning. Still, the author gives depth to her characters, especially Rachel, and visibly demonstrates their changes through the years. Her young protagonist’s childhood naïveté is charming, but the reader will enjoy seeing her become an elegant, mature young woman, aged by experiences that many other people never witness.
An ultimately optimistic and hopeful novel about growing up amid personal and political disarray.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-943006-48-9
Page Count: 246
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
