Not exactly the first time this author has featured noble dogs, convenient ghosts, and plucky gals.
Another formula romance from ever-popular Michaels (What You Wish For, 2000, etc.), this time featuring a talk-show psychologist and the men who wronged her college chum.
Dr. Jane Lewis is lovely, self-assured, successful, and popular—the exact opposite of the plump, shy frump she used to be. Her radio call-in show boasts thousands of listeners, and she sees patients privately as well. One case particularly troubles her: a man who blames his wife for the rape that shattered their marriage. Jane can't help remembering her friend Connie Bryan, homecoming queen at Louisiana State and fiancée of the football team's star quarterback, Todd Prentice. Connie was waylaid and gang-raped by four unknown men (who spurned the unattractive Jane), then killed herself when Todd broke off their engagement. Connie had sworn her friend to secrecy, not even telling her own parents of the rape before she committed suicide. Jane is now determined to find out more, and she does so with the help of another psychologist, hunky Dr. Michael Sorenson, her erstwhile high-school crush. The pair host Jane's show together and rekindle their long-ago romance as she begins investigating the circumstances of Connie's rape and subsequent death. Jane also grapples with her mixed feelings about her own looks, reaching the departed spirit of her cold-hearted beauty-queen mother through a resident ghost. (Mom finally apologizes!) Michael and Jane eventually figure everything out, of course. Aided by a crack team of K-9 dogs, Jane corrals the likely suspects and reveals that she has kept Connie's semen-stained clothing in a bag for all these years, somehow knowing that DNA testing would incriminate someone eventually. The rapists get their just deserts—and Jane gets Michael.
Not exactly the first time this author has featured noble dogs, convenient ghosts, and plucky gals.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-57566-673-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
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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