Great fun and—beneath the hijinks—a surprisingly substantial novel.
Emmy Award–winning TV journalist Kolpan extends his resume impressively with this picaresque debut novel, focused on “the woman” who knew Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Born Lorinda Jameson and forced to flee her Pennsylvania home when Sicilian “Black Hand” gangsters plot revenge for her late father’s gambling defaults, she moves to the West, first working as a Harvey Girl waiting tables at a Colorado railroad restaurant. Thereafter, the plot thickens every several pages, as the fugitive beauty now known as Etta Place turns her gun-toting and equestrian skills to violence, dispatching a would-be rapist, then hightailing it to Wyoming, where she falls for charming bad man Harry Longbaugh (aka “Sundance”); joins the notorious Hole in the Wall gang; and accompanies an ill-gotten treasure to safety in New York. There Etta encounters a virginal Eleanor Roosevelt (who, soon enough, becomes her beloved “Little Nell”), and she joins Colonel William Cody’s Wild West show (where she subs for the departed Annie Oakley). Are there more adventures yet to come? Yes there are. Reconnecting with “Sundance,” Etta joins him in Argentina, where Harry’s newfound revolutionary ardor does not dissuade him from attempting one last robbery. Consequently, Etta returns to respectability, fortune and the matured and muted love of “Little Nell,” who has been reinvented—as First Lady. Technically, there’s too much muchness in this sprawling narrative, which is festooned with newspaper stories, letters (Harry’s, sent to his respectable dad, are particularly delightful), journal entries and communiqués detailing investigations conducted by busy Pinkerton agents. But any reader who cherishes the beguiling tall tales spun by such masters as Charles Portis and Thomas Berger is unlikely to object. Few will have any more success resisting Etta than do the many men, women and other critters encountered during her memorable adventures.
Great fun and—beneath the hijinks—a surprisingly substantial novel.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-345-50368-8
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
