Odd but enjoyable tale, by a former producer of a children’s storytelling radio program in New Mexico.
Captivating cross between fairytale and contemporary romance.
A cat-loving woman with magical powers lives atop a southwestern mesa, where orchards and running streams are all part of a mirage she is able to enter and leave at will. She shares her lofty domain with 50 felines that talk to her (and sometimes sing in 50-part disharmony). Her alter ego and confidante is a tortoiseshell cat that warns her of an intruder in this imaginary paradise: a handsome, dark-haired young man named Angelo di Vita, who travels with a black dog by the name of Oso. The other cats are willing to ingratiate themselves with Angelo, who tempts them with succulent treats, but they keep an indignant distance from Oso, though the dog means them no harm. The CatWoman is sure she knew Angelo in one of her previous lives, perhaps in all of them. Like her, he’s half-cat. He’s been her friend and brother, but in this life (her fifth) he’ll become her lover and bring her back to the real world she has happily abandoned. Stoned to death as the daughter of a village witch in one of her previous incarnations, she still avoids people in this one. Yet Angelo persuades her to climb down the mesa’s steep slopes, and he brings her before the highly eccentric members of a school board made up of unreconstructed hippies and other counterculture types. She introduces herself as Kat O’Malley and begins to teach her teenaged students in her own way, skipping humankind’s endless wars and political upheavals in favor of a highly personal approach to history. Then overbearing Layira, the pyramid-dwelling, self-appointed goddess of a New Age commune, interferes—with disastrous results: her son and others stone another boy, who later dies when he takes a dare. Sadder but wiser, Kat and Angelo move on to greener pastures and a new life together.
Odd but enjoyable tale, by a former producer of a children’s storytelling radio program in New Mexico.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2002
ISBN: 0-425-18618-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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
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
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