More polished than this popular author’s usual (A Moment in Time, 2001, etc.), but still with plenty of sweaty sex for the...
Wronged wife vs. beautiful mistress. And the winner is . . . .
Carolina Mountcastle designs fantasies in flowers for New York’s super-rich, has a devoted clientele, a nice teenaged son, and darling Lyon, her studly, muscular, and very successful husband. Her claim to fame: replicating the lavish floral arrangements in Dutch Old Master paintings, a skill that keeps the nouveaux riche coming back for more. When a new client specifies blood-red roses to match the dripping gore in a Caravaggio painting of a beheading, Carolina is on it—with help from her muscular assistant Antonio, who really knows his stuff even if he spends too much time on the phone with various girlfriends. But a rival designer, pouty Payton Fitzsimmons, schemes to seduce Antonio so she can steal Carolina’s ideas and sabotage her fabulous creations. Now that Lyon is abroad on business, Carolina will have to figure out for herself why everything’s going wrong. Then—oh, no!—a call from the Amsterdam police shatters her world. Lyon is dead of a heart attack. The family gathers for the reading of his will, and Carolina is aghast to hear that Lyon has divided his fortune neatly between her and beautiful, blond Monique, the Amsterdam mistress she never knew he was keeping—and with whom, it turns out, he had daughter. Sunk in despair, Carolina vows to challenge the will and cut out this pretender, but her nice son intervenes: Apparently he’s always wanted a little sister, and he’s eager to meet Anja and her mother. Carolina kicks up a fuss but eventually goes along with him and meets the other woman. The tale quickly reaches its happy ending in a cathartic snifflefest for Lyon’s two loves; Payton’s mischief is revealed, Carolina is hailed as the next Martha Stewart—and a new love awaits her.
More polished than this popular author’s usual (A Moment in Time, 2001, etc.), but still with plenty of sweaty sex for the fans.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2002
ISBN: 0-525-94659-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
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
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