An often engaging tale of a confining society, rendered with love.
In Newell’s (The Fisherman and the Sperm Thief, 2016, etc.) second Fenria sci-fi novel, a woman tries to legally establish her own clan.
On the planet Fenria, matriarchal rule has created a culture in which most men rove the sea as fishermen or patrolling Seaguards, and women maintain highly ordered clans. Annon Noahee is the sister of Teakh, a Seaguardsman whose sperm was stolen for breeding purposes. Both siblings are nearly 24 years old and belong to Clan Ralko as wards of their conniving Aunt Dyse. Annon, however, wants to become the grandmatriarch of her own clan and establish equal ruling rights between men and women. Fenrian society has fewer males than females, and Teakh’s desirability as a monogamous mate has ironically pushed him into stud work. When Annon makes a deal with Queen Fenna that will allow her to fulfill her dreams of forming Clan Noahee and going to law school, there’s one caveat—Annon must bear the children of an anonymous male of the queen’s choosing. Annon, in turn, insists that natural insemination take place so that nobody’s stolen sperm—particularly a relative’s—can be used. What Annon doesn’t foresee, though, is that her anonymous donor hopes to change Fenrian society as much as she does. On this second trip to Fenria, author Newell revisits Teakh’s adventure in The Fisherman and the Sperm Thief, this time from Annon’s perspective. Once again, commentary on modern life in Western cultures is central to the narrative, most notably in passages that illustrate that matriarchies can be just as extreme as patriarchies. For example, when Annon proposes a clan run with a code of equality, she’s told that “It would destroy—yes, destroy—our most sacred institutions. Motherhood is under attack.” Newell also builds a tantalizing eroticism into Annon’s struggle; in one sex scene, for example, Annon “recognized experience when I saw it—no, when I felt it.” In the tale’s second half, though, the pace slows under the weight of the characters’ legal maneuverings, and readers may find themselves rooting for the coolly smart Annon to end an argument by simply slapping someone.
An often engaging tale of a confining society, rendered with love.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
