Williams has delivered an intelligent, insightful murder mystery that illuminates her imagined world and our own.
A young wife, mother, and serial-killer victim seeks answers after she is brought back by cloning.
In Williams’ adult debut, Tell the Machine Goodnight (2018), a Kirkus Prize finalist, the author cleverly conjured a near future in which technology could both remove us from and deliver us back to ourselves and one another. With this suspenseful, smart sophomore effort—a briskly paced story with charming characters at its core—Williams again imagines a near-futuristic, science-altered reality that offers an intriguing perspective on the push-pull of family and freedom. Lou, a 30-ish wife and mother of a 9-month-old daughter, whose work entails offering therapeutic hugs to people in a virtual reality setting, returns to her old life along with several other victims of a serial killer thanks to a controversial government cloning program. As Lou struggles to readjust following her murder, supported by her sweet, supportive husband, Silas, she finds herself dogged by lacunae in her memory: How, exactly, did her murder go down? What happened in the hours leading up to and just after it? And how does she, ostensibly the same woman in a replicated body, differ from the woman she was before? With other members of her serial killer survivors’ group, cloned women who convene weekly to process their emotions and experiences, Lou goes in search of answers. The search propels her—and us—along unpredictable paths to destinations that shed light not only on Lou’s life choices, but also those we all face.
Williams has delivered an intelligent, insightful murder mystery that illuminates her imagined world and our own.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9780593543764
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
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
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