A promising debut.
Journalist Florio’s story about a friend’s murder arrives crammed with atmosphere and intriguing characters.
Foreign correspondent Lola Wicks reluctantly returns from an assignment in Afghanistan, where she’s been holed up with a pool of reporters covering the conflict for so long that the dust, danger and shadowy way of life have become second nature. So when Lola ends up back in Baltimore to meet with an upstart young editor, she’s already sporting an attitude. When the editor informs her the newspaper is shutting down its overseas bureaus to concentrate on local news, Lola doesn’t take it well. A rebel and a loner, she heads for a short, preplanned visit with her close friend Mary Alice, also a former staffer at the paper. Mary Alice had taken an earlier buyout and moved to Montana, where she bought a cabin and went to work at the local paper. But when Lola arrives at the small airport, there’s no Mary Alice to greet her. Annoyed and in a hurry to return to Afghanistan, with or without the paper’s backing, Lola rents a car and drives up to her friend’s cabin deep in the woods near a tiny town called Magpie. But instead of a short reunion with Mary Alice, she finds her friend has been murdered, leaving behind her dog, a horse and a trail of clues that only someone like Lola, who knows her well, could follow. Lola plans to get out of town, but the sheriff has other ideas, and soon, she starts looking into her friend’s homicide, making friends and enemies along the way. Florio dips into her own background to make the protagonist competent and believable. Although it’s a bit difficult to buy Lola as a grizzled veteran at the tender age of 34, the author does a great job of writing a book that’s both evocative of the Montana countryside and a satisfying, hair-raising ride.
A promising debut.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-57962-336-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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