Contrived debut: pretentious, often silly.
Divorced journalist romances again—maybe.
Annie Hollerman didn’t think she’d ever love again after leaving her rich but dull husband (her mother’s nickname for him: the Cardboard Box). But her pal Laurie just won’t shut up about Jack DePaul, 50-ish features editor for a Baltimore daily—and, once introduced, the two circle each other warily, not wanting to be hurt again. Jack is still getting over his affair with the married Kathleen, a self-absorbed beauty who was happy to meet him now and then for hot but meaningless sex but wouldn’t leave her husband. Sadder but wiser, Jack ponders a big question: Could Annie, with her flowing, red-gold tresses, and fabulous cheekbones, be his soulmate? He woos her with carefully composed e-mails drawn on actual events in her life, in effect rewriting all her little sorrows and false starts into happy endings. Annie, however, doesn’t dare admit the Awful Thing she did years ago that got her fired from a North Carolina paper. She hopes Jack will never discover what it was because he’s sure to hate her when he does. They have so much in common, including a fondness for lattes and literature, casually quoting Tennyson and dismissing Raymond Carver in almost the same breath. It seems a match made in heaven, until a reporter actually does reveal the Awful Thing: Annie once plagiarized an article about inner-city housing and is still haunted by shame. Weepily, she reveals that her troubled family’s penchant for white lies drove her to it. But Jack loves her nonetheless. Planning a romantic tryst in New York brings him to a swanky hotel where he falls into the clutches of wicked Kathleen, who looks at his laptop while he’s otherwise occupied. Later, when Annie calls, Kathleen informs her that Jack used to write things like that for her, too, so ha! Annie is heartbroken. Will the star-crossed lovers ever find the happiness they deserve?
Contrived debut: pretentious, often silly.Pub Date: April 16, 2003
ISBN: 0-446-53080-8
Page Count: 244
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
