The real world intrudes only rudely on MacDonald’s sanctified town (Cape Breton Road, 2001): a place where love manages to...
Fifteen stories set in MacDonald’s apocryphal community and birthplace, Cape Breton Island.
“As kids Carmichael and his brother knew it was up north in Nova Scotia they came from, Cape Breton, referred to sometimes as down home or down east, from the taking patterns of sailing ships.” This is about as direct a reference to the place as we get in a large and emotionally potent second collection (after Eyestone, 1988): stories gathered around that single community, true, but much more interested in the subtle points of character than in blind adherence to a single place. The first, “The Flowers for Bermuda,” tells of a lobster fisherman, finding his faith, already strained by the death of his son, tested even further when he receives a postcard from a minister friend who is about to be stabbed and killed by thugs while on a trip to a supposedly better place. A mysterious man in “Green Grow the Grasses O” returns to Cape Breton to tempt two local women into reenacting a happy forgotten moment of his father’s, and to offer them some small bit of adventure in otherwise sheltered lives. Another man returns for a voyage (“Sailing”) of remembrance with his widower dad, a trip that will prove to be of ambiguous emotional purchase: “I stare into the vortex the ivy makes and imagine that black hole my father will wither into . . . . All I know, for certain, is that we are sailing.” An aging beachcomber recluse and a jilted divorcée looking for escape take solace in each other (and in some moonshine and a batch of wacky tabacky, washed ashore) when their predicaments suddenly give them a good deal in common. And in “Holy Annie,” a family recoils, in the wake of a father’s death by alcohol, into the kind of bickering that can only speak of vulnerability and a deeper love.
The real world intrudes only rudely on MacDonald’s sanctified town (Cape Breton Road, 2001): a place where love manages to thrive despite the onslaught.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-58243-241-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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