Touching on questions of race and class, McBride doesn’t break new ground and doesn’t go into much depth but tells a...
An intergenerational tale of four women—white, black, Filipina, and Mexican—set in Las Vegas from the 1950s to the present.
Starting with June Stein, who runs away from a boring marriage in New Jersey and marries a budding casino owner, McBride (We Are Called to Rise, 2014, etc.) ties together the stories of women who live in Las Vegas and the children they raise, love, and sometimes lose. Coral, who grows up thinking she knows her parentage but later learns she was adopted, buys a house on the same street as Honorata, a Filipina immigrant whose life is changed one night in June’s casino. Honorata hires an undocumented immigrant house cleaner, Engracia, whose part in the novel is to bring closure to both Honorata’s and Coral’s stories and who also brings the book full circle back to June, via the casino. What little is told of Engracia's life is both timely and interesting and merits more attention. Each of the four women makes decisions based on love, decisions which lead either to sacrifices, secrets, or both. Men enter the story briefly, cast as good husbands or complete disasters. Each of the women ends up feeling as June does: “Her world spun and spun, and all these ordinary parts of it, these things that made perfect sense, did not make sense at all. What was she doing? And what would she do now?” There’s enough information about June, Coral, Honorata, and Engracia to provide snapshots of their lives and compel readers to turn the pages, but not much more.
Touching on questions of race and class, McBride doesn’t break new ground and doesn’t go into much depth but tells a readable story that may appeal to book clubs who’d like to add their own analyses.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5778-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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