Likely the most silly-fun you can have with star-crossed lovers fighting the absurdity of an unjust world.
A young couple in the near future dares to lift the curtain on their hierarchical society, which segregates its population based on the colors they can—and can’t—see.
Though it’s been 15 years since Fforde published Shades of Grey (2009), this long-awaited sequel picks up right where things left off. Eddie Russett, a high-seeing Red, is still new to the fringe town of East Carmine, and his infatuation with daredevil Jane Grey, recently dubbed Jane Brunswick for her ability to see a small percentage of Green, is expanding his horizons in more ways than one. While society sees their fraternization as illegal—“It was one of the crueller Rules….If you were on the opposite side of the colour wheel, you’d be compelled to be on nodding terms for the rest of your lives”—Jane has encouraged Eddie not to care. And while it’s ingrained in Eddie to believe that if you question the Colourtocracy, you could die for it, he hasn’t caught the Mildew—the “disease” that suspiciously takes people when they are no longer useful to society—just yet. If he and Jane can bend one rule and survive, what else is not as black-and-white as it seems? If all this has you thinking of West Side Story and its inspiration, Romeo and Juliet, you’re bang on. Puns and references to the world as we know it are numerous, direct, and often absurdly funny, à la Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. Fforde expertly interlaces the most serious existential discussions with humor, favoring fun over drama—a most notable, laugh-out-loud example being the consultation of the Parker Brothers’ RISK Map to explore the possibility of there being a Somewhere Else. While this is generally a refreshing spin on the life-after-apocalypse genre, it hasn’t escaped a mild case of middle-book syndrome. The hyperfixation on dismantling the corrupt Colourtocracy makes the plot feel more formulaic as it builds toward the big revelation, undoubtedly setting up the final act.
Likely the most silly-fun you can have with star-crossed lovers fighting the absurdity of an unjust world.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781641296281
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
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
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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