A melodramatic and very often overwrought volume that attempts to capture the heart and soul of what it’s like to be the...
Written in Hopkins’ signature free verse (Triangles, 2011, etc.), this book examines the relationship between a young California woman and the Marine she loves in language that ranges from raw to tender.
Ashley and her Marine boyfriend paint their relationship in searing physical terms in this uneven tale of two best friends and the men they love. Ashley, a college student who still relies on her parents to support her, and Darian, her roommate, meet Cole and Spencer at a club one night. The two Marines are stationed nearby, but Wyoming-born Cole seems gentle and poetic to Ashley, despite his brutal profession. Ashley’s parents deplore the relationship, and her mother, who hates the military, is especially critical of the pairing. She believes Cole is a butcher, but Ashley, who knows that Cole writes poetry and has a loving, sweet side, is convinced he is a much more complex man than her parents realize. Darian and Spencer are another story, though. Their rocky relationship bounces from heaven to hell faster than a melting ice cube, and Darian’s sexuality is like a sign she wears around her neck. Although eventually married to Spencer, she can’t seem to stop finding other men with whom to occupy her time. Hopkins specializes in writing long-form free verse, and her fans are rabid about her work, but for those who’ve never before dipped a toe into this style, the book may prove tough going and, in some places, overtly sexual. Although the author assures readers she meticulously researched the book for details about the military and military life, she insists on calling Cole a “soldier,” which is a term appropriate to the Army, but eschewed by members of the Marine Corps. She gets many of the other details of military life right and brings much passion to her work, but that one major stumble may turn off military readers.
A melodramatic and very often overwrought volume that attempts to capture the heart and soul of what it’s like to be the girl left behind.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2637-7
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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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