Hella effort but may not make bank.
Kids face every possible pitfall of modern adolescence as they go from eighth grade to senior year of high school in Mill Valley, California.
Johnson’s debut novel bristles with authentic detail of life in Marin County, where the author was born and raised. She knows the high school—“stuccoed Creamsicle-orange, generously windowed, and radiantly trimmed”; the parents: “rich hippies parading along the triangle of avenues, congratulating themselves for buying Priuses along with their Range Rovers and getting their overpriced organic oranges at Whole Foods”; the teachers: nothing they enjoy more than "laughing bitterly at their own poverty" or "the insanity of Mill Valley parents"; and the local version of each archetypal teenage clique. Here the stoners, for example, are the Bo-Stin beach kids, from the coastal towns of Bolinas and Stinson Beach, with “hair that waved to their waists or shaggy mops or dreads, cutoff shorts or ripped flared jeans and thrift-store tank tops.” Johnson knows exactly how they talk—“That’s just Nick. He’s always doing some cutty James Bond shit like that”; how they feel playing video games: “The head exploded and shot fireworks of blood and bone into the sky and for a minute he felt hella raw”; and how they address each other on social media: “omfg em r u ok I cant beleive this happened.” Perhaps this acutely observed novel would have been more successful if the author hadn't felt compelled to include all of the following scenarios: A boy bullied into jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge by social media taunts. A girl preyed on by a pedophile middle school teacher, exposed on Snapchat. A supersmart drug dealer charging a desperate Asian striver $700 to take his SAT. A beautiful girl everyone hates. A house party that ends in a car wreck sending kids to the hospital and juvie. And last but not least, a popular athlete lured over the internet into acting in pornographic gay films.
Hella effort but may not make bank.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9727-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
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
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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