Slightly flawed, but an OK way to spend a rainy afternoon.
Screenwriter Dixon’s (The Language of Secrets, 2010) second novel centers on the convergence of the lives of three women who have a mysterious connection.
Livvi is a published novelist whose lonely, abusive childhood has left her emotionally damaged and needy. Growing up with a cruel stepmother and cold father, Livvi believes her mother was a party girl who abandoned her as a baby. Now an adult, Livvi has yet to break free of her need to find love and acceptance, and her relationship with Andrew, the rich owner of a publicity firm, seems to be exactly what she’s been looking for all her life—until she discovers that Andrew’s withheld huge secrets from her. Livvi begins to see that her knight’s shining armor is somewhat tarnished, but she feels obligated to stay with Andrew for one very important reason. Across the country, famous photographer Micah is informed that she’s ill and must begin treatment immediately if she wishes to survive. But Micah’s not sure she deserves to live. Before she decides, Micah sets out to settle some debts from her past, seeking out people she once knew. However, despite her generosity to a cab driver’s family, the absolution she seeks proves elusive. Flash back to 1986. AnnaLee is the devoted mother of a daughter whom she and her husband call “Bella.” They live in the home that once belonged to AnnaLee’s parents, a place where she always felt loved and secure, and AnnaLee is brokenhearted that she has to sell her parents’ treasures piece by piece to keep her family afloat financially. Husband Jack is a poor provider and a fragile man who leans on his wife for support, but AnnaLee hasn’t given up on him. Seemingly unconnected, these three women have one object in common: the image of a woman in a shimmering gown and pearl boots. Dixon’s narrative begins as a real page-turner but breaks down about two-thirds of the way through; by this point, some readers will put together all the pertinent information and spend the last third focusing on the minor holes in the story and the clunky dialogue.
Slightly flawed, but an OK way to spend a rainy afternoon.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4022-8572-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
© 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.
