A strange and fluffy confection with a thought-provoking core.
Working for a newspaper changes a misfit girl’s life in many ways in Giroux’s novel.
Pennacook, Massachusetts, is a town beset by constant floods in which menacing wild boars roam the streets/canals, people ride balance-bikes or pedal boats, and grocery store robots have banded together in the woods. Readers meet the novel’s protagonist, Wendy Zhou, during her difficult middle school years—Wendy’s father has recently died, no one in Pennacook can pronounce her last name, and her coming out as gay during a school dance goes disastrously wrong when her crush rejects and insults her. Writing for the Pennacook Beat newspaper gives Wendy a purpose, and she and the other kid reporters in her school-sponsored program uncover a case of corruption revealing the reasons for the floods and hordes of feral pigs—and the truth behind an idealistic-sounding scheme to cover the town with a giant dome. Interspersed with teen Wendy’s exploits are depictions of Wendy in the year 2032 as she nears college graduation. Both Wendy and her Pennacook Beat editor, Graham Bundt, are flawed characters, but the author makes them likable by showing their growth. Graham has a drinking problem and allows the newspaper to be co-opted for propaganda, but he’s worth redemption—he inspires kids to write and cares about the town he inhabits. Wendy can be unkind to her mom; she’s also an unreliable narrator, revealing late in the story that she has lied about some of her personal details. Still, the reader is on Wendy’s side when she learns to care deeply for someone and discovers her own strength. Though the story is frothy, Giroux embeds many serious themes in the narrative, including self-acceptance, suicide, sexuality, and racism. The book also convincingly explores the fragility of democracy, which is threatened in Pennacook. As Graham observes, quoting his hero, John Adams, “There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
A strange and fluffy confection with a thought-provoking core.Pub Date: June 18, 2024
ISBN: 9781734224047
Page Count: 306
Publisher: New Salem Books
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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