Teen angst south-of-the-border: Monroy’s debut is most notable for its pungent characterization of Mexico City, where...
A bright teenager whose free-spirited Foreign Service worker mother is transferred to Mexico City spends a momentous senior year struggling to find herself at an elite private school.
After a few stable years in Washington, D.C., Milagro “Mila” Epstein has plenty of misgivings when landing in the smoggy splendor of Mexico City. An excellent student raised in various countries by her single mother, Maggie, she is understandably curious to finally be living in the hometown of her biological father—a married Mexican politico whom Maggie refuses to name. (Her mom’s secret, which she claims to be keeping in an effort to protect them both, is but a small obstacle to the intrepid Mila, who has ambitions of becoming a journalist.) What really stresses the 17-year-old out is starting over at a new school. The fortress-like International School of Mexico (ISM) is about as cliquey as they came. A hotbed of sex, drugs and underage drinking, ISM has a student body made up of American kids with parents working in the city, a majority being the glamorous offspring of Mexico’s moneyed upper class (known as “fresas,” or strawberries, in the local slang). The fresas live in a rarified world of extreme privilege, with designer clothing, private cars with drivers and a lack of supervision that American kids can only dream of. Initially, Mila hangs out with her own kind, even losing her virginity, disastrously, to a friendly seeming boy-next-door type who never learned that no means no. She also experiments with drugs (and dealers) and battles with her well-meaning mother. Of course, Maggie has dramas of her own: She starts dating her married boss after her stand-up boyfriend Armando is murdered. When Mila starts dating the dreamy fresa Manuel, Maggie cannot help but approve. The son of a well-connected plastic surgeon, Manuel introduces the girl to the upper echelons of Mexican society, including the mystery man who may or may not be her dad. It is then left to Mila to decide how far to go for the truth.
Teen angst south-of-the-border: Monroy’s debut is most notable for its pungent characterization of Mexico City, where political assassinations and bribery are commonplace in a 12th grader’s life.Pub Date: June 10, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-52359-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2008
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
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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