A magical and poetic novel celebrating the beauty of Indigenous culture.
Vizenor’s novel celebrates Indigenous culture and the cultivation of a sense of belonging.
On the White Earth Reservation, Truman La Chance is a young orphan who creates poetic dream songs to understand the world around him. Adrift from others, he finally finds a sense of belonging at the Theatre of Chance in his local community. The theater, a “curious sanctuary for runaways,” is the brainchild of Dummy Trout, a puppeteer who has not spoken in over 50 years, since the Great Hinckley Fire of 1894, in which, at the age of 18, Dummy lost her family and loved ones and was consumed by grief. Decades later, following the Second World War, Dummy and her pet dogs preside over the theater, where she makes puppets and encourages the runaways and strays on the reservation to present stories to each other and the community. Over 12 chapters, the author uses the connections that a diverse range of Indigenous characters have to the theater to illustrate the building of a community amid the difficult circumstances on the reservation. Vizenor presents, in the context of puppetry performances, imagined conversations between historical figures such as Sitting Bull and President John F. Kennedy, Aristotle and James Baldwin, and Sacagawea and Tallulah Bankhead, which are the novel’s most intriguing feature. He also links Western cultural works, such as the opera Madama Butterfly, to the feelings and experiences of his Indigenous characters. The short novel is curious and winding and is at times hard to follow. But the author’s background as a poet is obvious in the lyrical prose (“He described the slight hesitations of his speech as the unexpected silence between a flash of lightning and crash of thunder”), making much of the language so beautiful that the meandering threads of the storyline do not detract from the reader’s enjoyment.
A magical and poetic novel celebrating the beauty of Indigenous culture.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780819500427
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Wesleyan Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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