A thrilling story of teenage survival and camaraderie.
An emotionally troubled 18-year-old contends with an island boot camp in Robinson’s novel.
Whaleback Island, off the coast of Maine, is a summer retreat for wealthy members of the Club—business executives and bluebloods from New York and Boston whose connections to the island go back, in some cases, for generations. It’s also home to the Whaleback Island Leadership Detail (WILD), a program sponsored by the Club in which wayward youth are reformed into upstanding citizens by a team of exacting ex-military instructors. Walt McNamara was a hockey star at his prep school in New Hampshire before he quit the team in the midst of a playoff game and then shattered four of the school’s trophy cases with a chair. At WILD, he’s been assigned to the “huddle” led by Dick Grunewald, a grizzled, humorless man missing several fingers. His huddle includes Tess, a motel worker from Maryland, and the tall, silent, mysterious Aubrey. Each huddle works as a team to support each other during the rigorous—and somewhat martial—physical training they undergo with the vague promise of Club employment at the other end. As Walt and his new friends struggle to stay sane in the face of the brutal regimen, they begin to question the true purpose of WILD—and the agenda of the Club behind it. Robinson captures the angst and excitement of teenage spaces, even unlikely ones, as here when Walt’s huddle must all sleep spooned together on an exposed smaller island: “To feel the movement of her breath against my chest, to feel even the slightest contact of my legs against her, to smell her dirty hair, which had probably not been grimy like this before and still smelled good, I felt like a space explorer zooming through the cosmos.” The twists toward the story’s end are not quite believable, but the author constructs a rich world of substantial characters caught in the muddled aspirations of young adulthood.
A thrilling story of teenage survival and camaraderie.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781952143922
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Islandport Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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