A gripping and psychologically sharp crime drama.
In this thriller, a group of strangers find themselves bound together in the aftermath of a catastrophe that’s reminiscent of the 9/11 attacks.
Caleb Drake takes the train from his residential suburb to Manhattan for work each day—a routine that’s typically uneventful. But on Oct. 10, he notices two small planes flying uncommonly low over the Hudson River, which turns out to be a harbinger of trouble. The train suddenly stops, and the frazzled passengers quickly discover that almost no one has cellphone service—and they’re certain that something terrible has happened when the train’s conductor, Charlie Murray, announces an order from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for everyone to remain on board. Unconfirmed rumors swirl like swarms of bees—maybe there was an explosion, there are evacuations underway—sending the train’s passengers into a spiraling panic. James Roth, one particularly agitated man, flees in defiance of the lockdown, intent on closing a billion-dollar deal in the city. Others quickly follow his lead, including Caleb and Rachel Silver, a real estate agent who seems to have the only working cellphone. Debut author Mott impressively unfurls a complex, suspenseful plot that launches with what turns out to be a terror attack. Caleb and Rachel are later drawn toward each other romantically, as both feel stuck in marriages that have lost their luster. Also, the death of Charlie’s father—who has a heart attack after someone steals his car—pulls the characters into what’s effectively a murder investigation. The author cleverly braids the lives of the various players into a coherent narrative tapestry, and he astutely dramatizes how crises can inspire promises that are abandoned later on. Caleb is tortured by his failure to fulfill his own pledges (“Don’t be trapped inside a haphazardly built life, a mind-numbing routine scraped together with bits and pieces of detritus from other people’s lives”), and Mott movingly depicts his struggle. However, Roth comes off as more of a cartoonish caricature—pure hubris incarnate—and readers may find his shallowness hard to believe.
A gripping and psychologically sharp crime drama.Pub Date: June 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9976405-7-1
Page Count: 345
Publisher: Val de Grace
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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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