A suspenseful but uneven drama.
A man on the run, grieving the end of his marriage and the loss of his child, returns to his small Minnesota hometown and reconnects with a lost love in Waxlax’s (The Earth Abides Forever, 2016) novel.
David Chapman built a life for himself in Los Angeles, complete with a wife and daughter, but he never forgot Angie Thomson, the hometown girl he loved before he was framed on drug charges and run out of town 33 years ago. After his daughter, Dani, is killed in a car accident, he and his wife divorce, and he decides to come home and confront his past. Angie still loves David, but she’s got her own messy past to overcome, including the murder of her mother; the institutionalization of her sister, Bunny; and her fraught relationship with her own daughter, Clarissa. What’s more, Randy Stark, the corrupt cop who framed David and once assaulted Angie, isn’t happy to see that David has returned. As David wrestles with his complicated feelings regarding Angie and Clarissa, they, along with Clarissa’s daughter, Elsa, try to get to the bottom of what really happened in the past so that they can move into the future. Waxlax has a compelling story idea, and he crafts some strong, complex female characters to anchor the narrative. However, the plot’s many twists, which include murder, rape, incest, and swapping sexual partners, feel a little over the top, instead of genuinely moving. The dialogue doesn’t always help; Clarissa, who’s romantically interested in David, asks her mother, “So are you claiming him or is it open season?”—a line that feels straight out of a soap opera. The tension between mother and daughter over the same man feels unnecessarily icky, especially as the story develops. If Waxlax had better grounded his characters’ actions in real emotions, it would have helped make this novel more accessible to readers.
A suspenseful but uneven drama.Pub Date: April 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5306-9161-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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