Fine has written an old-fashioned book with contemporary resonances.
A debut novel spins a fairy tale about the power and terror of female desire.
Sixteen-year-old Maisie Cothay leads an isolated existence. She was born with a rare talent: Her touch can kill living things and resurrect the dead. As a result, her mother died while Maisie was in utero, and she grows up at Urizon—her ancestral home, which has “a reputation for tragedy”—with only her academic father and a housekeeper for company. Maisie knows that something is cursed in her history: The portraits of her ancestors that line the halls come with legends and rumors about the “bedeviled family line.” Many of these stories involve the nearby forest Maisie grew up fearing, warned by her father to never enter. But when Maisie’s father disappears, leaving only a strange old map as a clue to his whereabouts, Maisie is convinced that the forest is the key to finding him. As Maisie ventures into the wider world for the first time, she must learn who can be trusted and, finally, via the mysterious woods, must reckon with the true nature of her own gifts and the cursed women in her lineage. Fine, too, looks to the past: Everything from the setting to the elegantly formal prose seems lifted from a 19th-century fairy tale—so much so that it can break the spell somewhat when characters refer to their sneakers or a recycling bin. The novel, with its mysterious forest and Maisie’s creative/destructive powers, works well as an allegory of a certain kind of traditional womanly experience of burgeoning sexuality, knowledge, and growing up; though not all female-identifying readers may see themselves here, the poise and skill with which the story unfolds is an undeniable pleasure.
Fine has written an old-fashioned book with contemporary resonances.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-268413-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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