A jarring book that thrives on its many contradictions.
After a 20-year absence, Lina returns to Medellín in search of the authenticity of her childhood. In a city busy rebuilding itself from the ruins of conflict, what she finds is nothing as simple as atonement.
For decades, Medellín, Colombia, had one of the highest murder rates in the world. Caught at the epicenter of the conflict between FARC guerilla forces, the government-backed paramilitary, and Pablo Escobar’s narco crime wave, the city was so dangerous that citizens were effectively under siege in their own homes and under active attack in the streets. Yet this is also the city Lina called home for the first eight years of her life, until her mother’s violent death, and the place to which she returns when she finds herself adrift at the end of her Ph.D. program in London. Lina seeks out her closest childhood friend, Mattías, with a vague plan of volunteering at the community center he runs in a desperately poor neighborhood. Lina struggles to reconcile her muddled memories of her friend Matty with the intense, edgy Mattías she now meets, but even as the pressure of the childhood secret she keeps begins to overwhelm her, strange occurrences at the Anthill start to mount. Is the sharp-toothed, gray-skinned boy the children see hanging around just another of Medellín’s forgotten street children, or is he something more sinister? Where does Mattías go during his long absences, and what happened to him in the years Lina was gone? Finally, in coming back to Colombia, is Lina doing a service to her city and to the memory of her past life, or is her very presence opening the wounds that have just begun to heal? Pachico’s (The Lucky Ones, 2017) second book continues to assert the young author’s mastery of her chosen landscape. The tension between the residents of Pachico’s vibrant and tormented Medellín and the mission groups, professional volunteers, and poverty tourists is palpable and gets to the heart of one of the area’s primary dilemmas—how to build on a past which cannot be spoken and yet will not be erased. The insertion of a supernatural element in the novel is distracting, however, and too overt a metaphor for the paradoxes more skillfully and subtly asserted by Pachico’s pitch-perfect rendering of Medellín’s many voices as they seek to reconcile their pasts with their futures.
A jarring book that thrives on its many contradictions.Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54589-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 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.
