A deeply felt coming-of-age story rich with respect for the natural world.
A sequel set in sub-Saharan Africa about a boy who grows to adulthood, becomes a safari guide, and takes a stand against poachers and a childhood nemesis.
In Cousins’ previous novel, Waiting for Bones (2011, etc.), American tourists on a photo safari face a life-or-death struggle to survive in the African wilderness when their guide, Bones, disappears, his fate a mystery. This novel came about, Cousins says in an author’s note, because the question of Bones’ disappearance was “too intriguing to ignore.” Her answer is an inspired, eventful coming-of-age story. It starts with Bones’ remembering his life as an impoverished 10-year-old boy, living on a small farm in his African village; he’s a gifted young carpenter who eventually realizes his dream career as a safari guide. Bones’ passion for knowledge and his soulful connection to nature—especially for elephants, whose populations are being decimated by ruthless poachers armed with military-grade weapons—shape the man he later becomes. So does a loss, chillingly depicted in the book’s first chapter, that affects his whole family; it also presages what’s to come in the unsavory form of a man named Skinner, a sadistic bully-turned–dangerous adversary. A skillful storyteller, Cousins gives weight and color to small events, such as the processes of crafting a wooden drawer and curing and drying impala meat, and to pivotal scenes, such as the horrific slaughter of an elephant herd. The environments of the village and wilderness are keenly observed, as is the book’s rich cast of characters, including Bones’ love interest, Mima Swale; Granny Nobbs and her attack chickens; cousin Squeak, who’s lost to a crocodile (“Death was never far from our world”); nurturing Uncle Stash; and hefty truck driver Chiddy, who has a face “as round and shiny as a kukui nut.” Although it isn’t necessary to have read the previous book, those who have will appreciate how the author gives Bones’ abandonment of the American tourists a sense of high-stakes urgency.
A deeply felt coming-of-age story rich with respect for the natural world.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5320-3544-9
Page Count: 244
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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