Smooth as silk, there’s no reason to think that this charming, sweet story will fail to find an audience ready and willing...
Red-hot screenwriter (one movie out, one in the can, six more in production) Shepherd takes a breather to bring out a first novel, a tale of redemption and romance about a Wall Street man of steel who crumbles mid-deal when his entire reason for being evaporates.
Known on the Street and beyond as The Assassin, Henry Chase was actually a mild-mannered, going-nowhere teenager in nowhere Kansas until his unlikely prom date, the beautiful, going-somewhere Elizabeth, first seduces him and then tells him she can’t see him anymore because he’s a loser. Cut to the quick, Henry proves her wrong by leaving Kansas and making it big in New York, but when he returns ten years later to acquire the hotel owned by his chief rival for her affections, he learns that Elizabeth really dumped him because she knew she was going to die young of a heart defect. About to throw himself out a window of the hotel in despair, Henry is stopped by a wise-cracking housekeeper Sophie, who turns out to be a psychology grad student with a plan that will make Henry whole again. His List of Wrongs, prepared with Sophie’s help, names those whose lives Henry destroyed on his way to the top, and he and Sophie cross the country to face each of them so that Henry can beg forgiveness. The first of Henry’s former victims slugs him in the face; the second pulls out a gun and pretends to shoot him at point-blank range; the third drops a Bloody Mary (glass and all) on his head from a second-floor window; the fourth, a man twice Henry’s age, beats him savagely in a squash match. But somehow every one of them forgives him, and Henry has the added blessing of falling in love with Sophie, who stands by him through it all. Unfortunately, as he learns when he goes back to Kansas to right the final wrong, Sophie is not quite what she seems: she’s really an escapee from a mental hospital and a convicted murderer.
Smooth as silk, there’s no reason to think that this charming, sweet story will fail to find an audience ready and willing to lap it up.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-59071-001-0
Page Count: 303
Publisher: Rugged Land
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
© 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.
