A potent exploration of youth, innocence, and the abuse of authority.
A surprise encounter prompts a woman to recall her experiences at a parochial school in Gschwandtner’s novel.
In the early 2000s, Susannah Greenwood travels from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco, and on her way to her hotel, she runs into Daria McQueen, a former classmate from Foxhall, a co-ed Quaker boarding school in Pennsylvania. The meeting takes Susannah back to the fall of 1960, when she entered the school as a sophomore. Foxhall offers its students a fresh start from tumultuous home lives, and she quickly falls in with a clique of popular girls—Daria, Jan, Faith, and Brady. She joins the diving team and falls in love with a senior named Wes Ritter and also begins a friendship with another new girl at Foxhall, the academically brilliant but socially awkward Moll Grimes. In addition to classes, Quaker meetings, and dances, Susannah experiences the heavy-handed authority of the stern, unyielding headmistress, Miss Margaret Bleaker, who has high expectations for Foxhall students. The tension resulting from the youthful desire to test boundaries eventually culminates in a dramatic misuse of power with devastating consequences for Moll and Miss Bleaker, leaving Susannah to ponder the cost of protecting a vulnerable friend. Overall, this is a deftly constructed coming-of-age story with well-drawn characters and the narrative momentum of a thriller. Gschwandtner (Carla’s Secret, 2013, etc.) is a gifted storyteller who ably balances the past and present throughout the novel and never puts a foot wrong. Susannah’s keen observations of life at the school and of her mother’s erratic behavior are sharp and perceptive. As the titular “other new girl,” Moll is depicted as bright but painfully shy, offering a sympathetic contrast between Susannah’s and Moll’s experiences. The supporting characters are equally well-developed; Wes, for example, struggles to reconcile his Quaker faith with his reluctance to register as a conscientious objector, and Miss Bleaker’s devotion to her position and the school is shown to be all-consuming.
A potent exploration of youth, innocence, and the abuse of authority.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63152-306-9
Page Count: 264
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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