An unlikely take on the buddy story, this book offers a conventional plot but strong, nuanced characters.
A debut novel follows two young Mormon missionaries in the late 1970s.
When the reader first meets narrator Kenny Feller, he is 20 months into his two-year commitment of finding converts for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Proceeding with his project in Sedro-Woolley, Washington, Feller is largely unsuccessful. As he explains, “In my entire twenty months sharing the gospel, my companions and I had shepherded a total of two seekers into the waters of baptism. Two.” In August 1979 he is teamed up with a new partner, Jared Baserman from Idaho. Wisecracking (“You never knew, with Jared, if you were walking, unwittingly, into a punch line”) and flippant, Jared boasts a well-meaning but financially inept father and a marijuana-loving sister. Sent on his mission as a way to redeem his family, Jared is hardly the squeaky-clean figure one might expect from a proselytizing Mormon. Forming a friendship, Kenny and Jared face a world that often displays hostility to their church and challenges their personal beliefs. Detailing the aspects of the seemingly impossible missionary process (such as encouraging potential converts to “read the Book of Mormon—all of it, preferably, or at least some of its choicest selections—and then ask Heavenly Father to convey to them a testimony of its truthfulness”), the book provides a wealth of information on problems common in the field. Persuading strangers to take up a religion is certainly no easy task and the narrative effectively treats its protagonists as multifaceted characters. Exploring thornier issues of Mormon Church beliefs, like the rule that black men could not hold the priesthood until 1978, the story remains investigative without being overly facetious. But descriptions can prove less than illuminating, such as when a character looks at Jared “with his eyes bugging out of his head.” But on the whole, the plot moves quickly despite such distractions. While the book’s conclusion, particularly as Jared becomes ever stranger, seems self-evident, the tale’s excitement comes in the characters and their struggles along the way.
An unlikely take on the buddy story, this book offers a conventional plot but strong, nuanced characters.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5188-8109-1
Page Count: 268
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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