An uplifting, modest tale of algebra and second chances.
A wholesome romance about a 1960s teenager who falls in love with her math teacher.
Debut novelist Hill presents a spot-on heroine in Sarah Thompson, every varsity letterman’s dream girl. A local policeman’s daughter, Sarah is beautiful, kind, popular and utterly unattainable. Her mother suffers a chronic illness, leaving Sarah to function as both mother and daughter, preparing meals and looking after her father and younger sister. Despite the weight of her responsibilities, Sarah makes top grades and outperforms her peers in every subject except math. Her 11th-grade algebra instructor, new faculty member Travis Hall, makes everything even more complicated. Travis only accepted a teaching job on Long Island after an auto accident ended his military career on the eve of his graduation from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He never expected to find somebody like Sarah Thompson—heart-stoppingly beautiful but much too fragile and much too young. He invests himself in advancing her mathematical skills as a way of channeling his feelings in a permissible direction. As the narration shifts from Sarah’s point of view to Travis’ and back again, readers learn that each character is ignorant of the other’s feelings. By the school year’s end, Travis helps Sarah pass his class and her state algebra exam. Unfortunately, personal tragedy suddenly calls him to his family home in Arizona, and it seems he may be out of Sarah’s life forever. After Travis’ departure, neither he nor Sarah is able to forget the affair that never started. Through straightforward, accessible prose, Hill tells a sweet story of two painfully honorable individuals unwilling to compromise their dreams of true love. Heavy on basic math concepts and light on steamy sex scenes, the book leaves almost everything to the imagination. Given the high school setting and its simple structure, the story would be appropriate for both young adults and mature readers who are interested in deep personal connections based on shared values.
An uplifting, modest tale of algebra and second chances.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-1490313252
Page Count: 457
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2013
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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