Thinly conceived and timidly executed.
Mormon teen’s sisters meet grisly deaths, resulting in a slow slog over the much-trod territory of post-traumatic stress.
Mitchard (The Breakdown Lane, 2005, etc.) is defter with melodrama that admits some farce, an element sorely lacking in this glacially paced chronicle of slaughter’s aftermath. Twelve-year-old Veronica (Ronnie) Swan is playfully hiding from her sisters in a shed near the Swan family’s Utah home. She emerges to carnage: Scott Early, a pharmacy student on a psychotic rampage, has murdered her sisters with her father’s weeding scythe, in what the media will call the Grim Reaper slayings. The Swans are victimized again when Early’s diagnosis of schizophrenia means he is incompetent to stand trial. Instead, he is committed for four years—a lenient sentence, but a convenient one, plot-wise. The author offers an interminable depiction of the depressing numbness of the Swans’ days (Papa goes for long walks at night, Mama takes to her bed). Eventually the parents decide that forgiving Early is the only way the family can find release, but Ronnie refuses to participate in the therapeutic meeting with Early and his wife, Kelly. The moribund drama almost revives when Ronnie, 16, decamps for California, ostensibly to train as a paramedic and raise funds for college and medical school. Early, now medicated and released, is living with Kelly in San Diego, and Ronnie contrives to become, under assumed name and hairdo, nanny to their infant, Juliet. While saving lives as an apprentice EMT, Ronnie has vague plans to avenge her sisters’ deaths or rescue adorable Juliet by kidnapping her. But Mitchard pulls back before things can get remotely nefarious. Instead, there’s—you guessed it—peace and reconciliation. The Mormon aspect adds no resonance. The Swans might as well be Lutherans, like Early.
Thinly conceived and timidly executed.Pub Date: May 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-446-57875-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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
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