A well-written but overlong emotional drama with a far-too-churlish protagonist.
A woman is shaken by her late father’s scathingly critical journal entries in Wilke’s debut novel.
Leo Curzio, a professional writer, avidly chronicled his thoughts for his entire adult life, resulting in boxes of journals containing his meditations on just about everything. After he dies of a stroke, his adult children start to read them, and some are shocked by his brutal judgments. His harshest criticisms were aimed at his daughter Tessa, and he expressed profound disappointment in the distance between her considerable promise as a musician and meager accomplishments as a writer. Tessa is distraught after reading the entries, and she starts to rethink her life in its totality: her failed relationships, her abandoned music career, her abandonment of Catholicism and temporary embrace of Scientology, and her writing career, which she loves but frustrates her. She turns to her aunt, Joanne, a therapist and spiritual counselor, for some solace, and she delves into an assignment for the magazine that employs her—a series on father-daughter relationships. But all this angst-ridden self-reflection takes an emotional toll on her, and her relationship with her live-in boyfriend, Dave, starts to molder under the strain. Wilke writes with razor-sharp wit and radiant flair, and the prose’s high quality is the novel’s principal strength. She also sensitively portrays how real love and affection can survive and even flourish in an otherwise dysfunctional family. However, Tessa’s world-weariness, while often a source of comedic relief, eventually becomes tedious and, at times, painfully self-indulgent. For example, when Dave offers her a heartfelt apology for missing Leo’s funeral, she acidly responds: “Maybe when you’re reviewing your new corporate candidates for your next relationship, you can make sure none of them actually expect you to show up for the important moments. Because while you were busy judging me and my pathetic worldview, you forgot to realize what a shallow, meaningless, unforgivable prick you are.”
A well-written but overlong emotional drama with a far-too-churlish protagonist.Pub Date: May 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4975-9630-6
Page Count: 340
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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