An okay addition to the food-as-metaphor-for-life genre—if not an inspired debut.
A dumped wife ponders where it all went wrong—and bakes a lot of bread in the process.
Thirty-one-year-old Wynter Morrison had it all, including David, her tall, blond, handsome hubby who didn’t even want her to work (not worthwhile tax-wise, says he). Well, Wynter is ready to give up teaching and play the rich-wife role to the hilt. After all, David’s a marketing whiz and a slave to his high-powered job. But when he suddenly decides to leave the rat race—and her—Wynter just doesn’t believe it. He means business, though, and it’s not long before Wynter is on her way to Seattle to cry on the shoulder of her childhood friend, CM, a cynical beauty and man magnet. CM tells Wynter that she couldn’t possibly have been happy “tooling around L.A. in your sports car and sitting through boring committee meetings and eating artistic little arrangements of sushi for lunch and giving dinners for people you loathe and spending shitloads of money on clothes that don’t even look like you.” Wynter is nonplussed, obviously never having thought much about it. Her biggest problem now is finding gainful employment. Perhaps the bread-baking skills she learned at her student job in France will come in handy? She’s soon up to her elbows in organic flour from the Pike Place Market and mulling things over when the unpleasant reality of divorce begins: Her lawyer wants to know if Wynter’s relationship with CM is, um, entirely platonic and hints that her soon-to-be-ex is likely to cause all sorts of trouble. Her mother insists that Wynter is suffering from clinical depression. But Wynter copes bravely, makes new friends, and finds true love: hunky Mac MacCleod, a vision in plaid flannel and denim. She comes up with loads of swell recipes, too, tucked in here and there for carbohydrate-craving readers who won’t find much meat in this all-too-familiar tale.
An okay addition to the food-as-metaphor-for-life genre—if not an inspired debut.Pub Date: July 10, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-018895-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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