A debut novel that would’ve worked better as a Lifetime Network screenplay.
Proving that a timely theme hardly guarantees a fascinating read, here’s an earnest clunker about school violence.
Timorous, gray-haired Elda Graff, sidelined by life, ushers at the community theater and subs for the Barberton School District. While Jordan makes her sympathetic, she’s rarely interesting—nor are, to any real degree, the novel’s other characters. Looking up from her program for the Little Players’ production of Heidi, Elda sees someone whom she finds almost threateningly exotic—Joanne Davies, Birkenstock-shod and garbed in silk. Turns out that Joanne, pregnant by her boyfriend, Eros, needs a maternity-leave fill-in for her high-school English classes. It’s been 30 years since Elda did any but part-time teaching, and, once returned to the classroom, she’s startled at Joanne’s adventurousness. While the departed hippie’s radical lesson plans add up to little more than mildly free-form creative-writing exercises, they do provide student Tucker Harding a chance to vent. He’s the school’s obligatory misfit, given to explosive fisticuffs. And his prose efforts for Elda do seem a bit too William Burroughs for comfort: “Kitchen sink and back of hand cries for last pillow…” While Elda works hard to save Tucker—misunderstood, of course, rather than malevolent—she’s made to deal with demons that forced her premature retirement three decades earlier, demons from the past inspired by Sarah Pogford, a student who was murdered by none other than, still whisper the townsfolk, Mack, Elda’s schoolbus-driver husband. Defiantly insisting on Mack’s innocence, Elda sees Tucker as a child she can save, Sarah’s psychic descendant. Not a bad plot, but sabotaged by colorless, flat writing.
A debut novel that would’ve worked better as a Lifetime Network screenplay.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-57962-166-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2008
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
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
© 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.
