The blend of murder mystery and Native American legend can be intriguing, but Elsie, who never speaks for herself, remains...
A stranger visits a small town to uncover the truth about the short, tragic life of a Native American woman in 1960s South Dakota.
Born into poverty to a Dakota mother and a black father she never met, Elsie Roberts never fit in with the Native American or white communities. Cleaning houses and looking after her sick mother, Elsie’s life takes a terrible turn one winter day when she is brutally raped and left for dead by four joyriding white teenagers. She beats the odds and regains consciousness to discover not only that her mother has died—but that the boys who hurt her were killed in a car wreck the very night of her attack. After she recovers, a local church intervenes and gets the vulnerable-seeming young woman a new job in a nearby town where she keeps to herself but seems to find some happiness doing beadwork and receiving visitors. Striking yet childlike, Elsie also has a strange effect on some of the local men, including the young Catholic priest she works for, and the rancher husband of a well-meaning white woman who befriends her. After Elsie is murdered while walking home one night, the gossiping about her only intensifies when the top two suspects in her slaying are found dead. Could it be that Elsie was really the seductive embodiment of the “Deer Woman,” an avenging force in native legend? Or just a lost soul who never had a chance? And what about the mummified baby found in her cabin? Told via flashbacks to an unnamed narrator somehow connected to Elsie, this frequently sad story is most interesting when showing the intersection of modern and Native life, such as Elsie’s attempts to tan her own deer hides using ancient methods.
The blend of murder mystery and Native American legend can be intriguing, but Elsie, who never speaks for herself, remains an enigma, making it hard to see her as anything other than a victim.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0-8032-9865-X
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Bison/Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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