Excellent, both as a reproductive dystopian narrative and as a social novel about women and class.
At a luxurious secret facility in the Hudson Valley of New York, women who need money bear children for wealthy would-be mothers with no time for pregnancy.
Golden Oaks is a division of a high-end luxury services company that has found a new way to meet the needs of its customer base. The company recruits healthy young women—the Hosts—implants them with fertilized eggs from the Clients, houses and feeds them, manages their pregnancies, and monitors their every move, breath, and heartbeat until delivery, at which point the Host receives a huge payout. The operation is run by Mae Yu, a Chinese-American Harvard Business School graduate whose insatiable ambition and moral turpitude conflict with—and keep winning out over—her sympathy for the women who work for her, mostly nonwhite immigrants. Central among them is Jane, a Filipina with a 6-month-old baby who is financially desperate after losing her job as a nanny. For Jane, Golden Oaks is a godsend, not to mention the nicest place she's ever lived, until she realizes that being separated from her daughter is unbearable. Even though there are many other Filipinas, she feels completely isolated until befriended by her roommate, Reagan McCarthy. Reagan is one of the few who represent "the holy trifecta of Premium Hosts": white, pretty, and cum laude from Duke. Reagan's anomie and desperate need to be of use motivate her as much as the need to be free of her financially controlling father. Lisa, the other white girl at Golden Oaks, is on her third assignment at what she calls "The Farm." She is the only one who sees the exploitative, Orwellian setup for what it is, and her ongoing efforts to game the system eventually lead to big trouble...for Jane. Perhaps the most powerful element of this debut novel by Ramos, who was born in Manila and moved to Wisconsin when she was 6, is its portrait of the world of Filipinas in New York. The three-page soliloquy of instructions for nannying delivered to Jane by her more experienced cousin is a work of art in itself.
Excellent, both as a reproductive dystopian narrative and as a social novel about women and class.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9848-5375-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PROFILES
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.
Tremendous in scope—tremendous in depth of penetration—and as different a Steinbeck as the Steinbeck of Burning Bright was from the Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath.
Here is no saga of the underprivileged—no drama of social significance. Tenderness, which some felt was inherent in everything Steinbeck wrote, is muted almost to the vanishing point in this story of conflict within character, impact of character on character, of circumstances on personalities, of the difficult acceptance of individual choice as against the dominance of inherited traits. The philosophy is intimately interwoven with the pace of story, as he follows-from New England to California over some fifty odd years-the two families which hold stage center. There are the Trasks, brothers in two generations, strangely linked, strangely at war the one with the other; there are the Hamiltons (John Steinbeck's own forebears), a unique Irish born couple, the man an odd lovable sort of genius who never capitalizes on his ideas for himself, the tiny wife, tart, cold-and revealing now and again unexpected gentleness of spirit, the burgeoning family, as varied a tribe as could be found. And- on the periphery but integral to the deepening philosophy which motivates the story, there is the wise Chinese servant scholar and gentleman, who submerges his own goals to identify himself wholly with the needs of the desolate Adam Trask, crushed by his soulless wife's desertion, and the twin boys, Cal, violent, moody, basically strong enough to be himself—and Aron, gentle, unwilling to face disagreeable facts, beloved by all who met him. In counterpoint, the story follows too the murky career of Adam's wife, Cathy—who came to him from a mysteriously clouded past, and returned to a role for which she was suited—as a costly whore, and later as Madame in Salinas most corrupt "house," where the perversions of sex ridden males were catered to—and cruelty capitalized upon.Shock techniques applied with rapier and not bludgeon will rule the book out for the tender-skinned.
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1952
ISBN: 0142004235
Page Count: 616
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1952
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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