No matter a person’s ethnic or cultural background, this book is relatable.
Lester’s (Black, White, Other, 2011, etc.) poignant narrative probes the relationship between a mother and her biracial daughter.
Young Lizzie O’Leary is a starry-eyed idealist who drops out of college in 1963 and heads to Greenwood, Miss., to become a civil rights volunteer. When she meets and falls in love with Solomon Jordan, an African-American musician and recent college graduate, they move to San Francisco. Fifteen years later, their biracial marriage has produced two children, Ruby and Che, who’ve been raised to identify with their black heritage. Lizzie spouts the doctrine and attends the rallies—whenever Solomon doesn’t try to keep her hidden away from his Black Panther colleagues—but her white skin and flaming red hair brand her as an outsider. However, Lizzie’s an activist who’s adopted feminist beliefs as well, and she’s angry that Solomon spends so much time outside the home while she’s expected to raise the children and care for the house. Their constant arguments lead to divorce, and when Lizzie and Solomon split up, Che goes to live with his father, and Ruby’s forced to stay with her mother. An angry young teenager, Ruby resents Lizzie both for what she perceives her to be (self-absorbed and racist) and what she knows she cannot be (someone who can empathize with her feelings as a person with a culturally diverse background). Contributing to the frayed relationship is the fact that Lizzie attacks her mothering role with vigor while also going to the opposite extreme. She recruits a biracial woman to mentor Ruby and then has an affair with her. Lizzie tries to engage Ruby in mother–daughter time by cultivating a garden, but she forgets to pick her up after hockey practice. She encourages her daughter to become self-sufficient by refusing to cook but insists on hiring a baby sitter for Ruby on the evenings she works late. The struggle to heal the rift between the two is both complex and emotional. Lester writes well about a subject familiar to her: She’s a member of a biracial family, and her previous book, geared toward young adults, addresses the same issue.
No matter a person’s ethnic or cultural background, this book is relatable.Pub Date: May 28, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-9318-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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