This field guide to both nature and life offers morals on grief, survival, and community in an often too-pat package.
A divorced scientist trying to make sense of her life climbs into a tree—and stays put.
Forest Service worker Kate Sinclair is at a crossroads. Childless and newly single, she decides to climb into a loblolly pine and set up camp there. Her friends assume she’s going through a midlife crisis; townspeople think Kate must be protesting the imminent loss of the forest at the hands of developers. Kate herself admittedly doesn’t know what she’s doing, only that the forest is where she’s always felt most at home, even as a child before trauma changed her life forever. An avid birder, Kate tries to focus on the drama of the avian world in the forest—watching a horned owl pair roosting, searching for an elusive endangered woodpecker—but the drama of her small town keeps intruding. Some characters search her out to antagonize her, as in the case of some teens being kept from lucrative jobs working on the development construction; others come to seek her guidance, like the high schooler hoping to make a career of entomology. To top it all off, a mysterious man is watching her through binoculars from the edge of the forest, and she doesn’t know if he means to help or harm. Hinton (Sister Eve and the Blue Nun, 2016, etc.) does an admirable job of keeping the pacing brisk despite being limited to a single tree for the virtual entirety of the book’s setting. And Kate, as a protagonist, is messily complex and often frustratingly self-absorbed—in short, a real, recognizable person. But the plot is too often in service of the life lessons here instead of the other way around.
This field guide to both nature and life offers morals on grief, survival, and community in an often too-pat package.Pub Date: June 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-58838-347-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: NewSouth
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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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