Good-natured, witty, told with an agreeably light touch: a story that enchants with its own simplicity.
A bright and genial debut about a girl’s awkward coming-of-age in 1980s Canada.
Faith DiNapoli’s mother always knew she would have four children, though she had thought they’d all be boys and she’d name them after the four evangelists. But Faith, her second child, upset those plans, and the DiNapoli brood turned out to be split down the middle by gender: Matthew, Faith, Hope, and Charlie. Faith’s father Joe emigrated from Italy as a young man but never really mastered English and kept the customs of the old country. Faith’s mother, Nancy, came from an Italian family, too, but (as she was always quick to point out) not one as “ethnic” as her husband’s. Joe DiNapoli was a construction worker whose work often took him away from home for long periods. Despite that, the DiPalma home was happy, and Faith had no bad memories of her early childhood. From about the age of seven, however, a cloud descends upon her world. On the day of her First Communion, her mother becomes violently sick in the car—which turns out to be more than a bad omen. Nancy disappears into the hospital for treatment of her mysterious “flu,” and once she comes home, she refuses to set foot in church again—or to speak to the parish priest, who seems eager indeed to have a word with her. Neighbors gossip, Faith’s father goes on about some “sin,” and eventually the entire family moves from Windsor to the little backwoods town of Emeryville, where life goes on more happily—until Faith discovers her mother’s journal and eventually learns the secret that her mother has long concealed. Told across a period of many years, Nancy’s confession becomes one more step in Faith’s entry into the adult world.
Good-natured, witty, told with an agreeably light touch: a story that enchants with its own simplicity.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-2522-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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