High drama and a fast-moving plot boost a sports tragedy with stock characters.
A dramatic, swiftly plotted tale of a deeply flawed man and his family caught between a tragic soccer coach with a heart of gold and his nemesis, who is intent on destruction regardless of the collateral damage.
Mario Santini’s son Luca has the potential to be a star soccer player, studying under the tutelage of former Bulgarian soccer star Georgi “Bobo” Stoikov. Having defected to America and no longer able to play his beloved sport, purist Bobo works hard to instill a love of the game in the Michigan young men he coaches. Most of the parents deeply appreciate Bobo’s efforts and his strong commitment to sportsmanship. One man in particular, though, prefers to promote winning at all costs. Rival soccer coach Sonny Christopher is determined to undermine and eliminate the saintly Bobo using any means necessary, ignoring the potential consequences. When Sonny insinuates the unthinkable, both Bobo and Luca become outcasts, setting an unstoppable chain of events in motion that leaves two men dead and another fighting for his life. Maccagnone’s Catholic-influenced debut novel is full of tension–between Bobo and Sonny, Mario and his drug-smuggling family and between adulterous Mario and his innocent wife. Stock characters (save for Mario, who is deeply flawed and unlikable) cause the story to fall flat. The author is skilled at bringing soccer and boxing to life on the page and making them accessible to readers unfamiliar with the sports. However, while the overall story arc is solid, the author’s delivery could use editorial and structural polish. The book closes with two unrelated short stories, both of which are unremarkable. In “White Fang,” fraternal hijinks end in revenge in front of a church full of onlookers. In “My Dog Tim,” a family dog’s last hurrah coincides with a boy’s transformation into a man.
High drama and a fast-moving plot boost a sports tragedy with stock characters.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4196-7879-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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