An imaginatively conceived tale of the future.
The latest chapter in an ongoing series set in a dystopian America in which the sexes are at war.
In the new novella from Beaudoin (Sex Wars 2084 Book Two, 2014, etc.), an army of “ultra-feminist” women have succeeded in driving a large group of men into hiding in the rugged wilderness of northern Florida. There, they live in secret encampments to avoid indoctrination into what they consider a feminist society gone berserk. The ultrafeminists sneeringly refer to this fugitive enclave as “the Wild Men,” but when a thermonuclear war suddenly wipes out most of the world’s other males—and renders many of the survivors sterile—the women are forced to change their behavior. The Wild Men’s wilderness shelters protected them from disabling radiation, and they therefore now represent humankind’s sole chance for survival. A protracted war arises, and to circumvent these hostilities, the ultrafeminists develop a series of female clones specifically designed to entice the Wild Men into mating (and equipped to force them, if necessary). Beaudoin’s third volume picks up in the middle of this conflict. Two formerly brainwashed ultrafeminist clones, Chontelle and Dominique, have learned to live their lives in the natural world with the Wild Men. The men have captured three women conditioned to support the ultrafeminist cause—and as the novella’s action opens, Wild Man leader Frederick, Chontelle and Dominique are trying to convince them of the rightness of old-fashioned gender relationships. Beaudoin tells the unfolding story mostly in dialogue, in a playlike format that’s occasionally broken up by Dominique’s first-person narration. Although some of the characters are prone to speechifying at length, the overall format keeps the plot developments moving briskly along. The book’s larger implications, of course—particularly regarding feminism—will no doubt irritate some of Beaudoin’s potential readers; it’s difficult, for example, to imagine many women enjoying this story, which is a sort of reverse-image of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). Nevertheless, there’s a good deal of engaging discussion about gender stereotypes (“Men live with the face they’re born with while women have to put on their face each morning”) and social roles here.
An imaginatively conceived tale of the future.Pub Date: April 17, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 132
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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