A darkly glittering jewel from a promising new voice in thrillers.
Reduced to picking up men in bars in hopes of trading sexual favors for a meal, Ella is definitely down on her luck. So when an offer comes to work as a nanny for a wealthy young couple, she jumps at the chance. But the job may cost more than she bargained for.
Ensconced in a lovely town house between Park and Lexington avenues, Lonnie and James seem to have everything Ella never had. Both women lost their mothers early, but Lonnie’s died young, leaving her to the care of an overbearing father and private school, while Ella’s simply packed up and left. Instead of struggling to make rent, Lonnie luxuriates in writing, easily living off her own trust fund and James’ work in finance. Yet Lonnie seems to invite disaster, trysting with their friend Carlow practically under James’ nose. Soon Ella finds herself drawn into games of sexual risk, assumed identities, and drug-addled escapades. With each character unstable and unreliable, Stevens’ debut novel shimmers with tension. Ella isn’t simply a damsel in distress; she might be a villain herself. Stealing mementos from Lonnie’s closet, borrowing her clothes, reading (and rewriting) her journal (not-so-cleverly hidden in the freezer)—Ella treasures these souvenirs, squirreling away rings and someone else’s memories with equal abandon. What everyone in this novel wants is both crystal clear—money, power, attention—and deliciously obscure. Why is Ella so drawn to Lonnie? Why is Lonnie so eager to pull Ella into a tangled web of marital and extramarital relationships? Stevens delicately pulls the threads together, ever so slowly, until a fateful night strangles any possibility of changing the course of anyone’s fate. And then Lonnie disappears.
A darkly glittering jewel from a promising new voice in thrillers.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-288322-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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