A sitcom with heart, and a whole lot of fun.
A wimp travels the rocky road to empowerment in the Massachusetts author’s fourth novel.
Medwed, who struck romantic-comic gold with Mail (1997) and Host Family (2000), is an insistently friendly writer who chats frequently with the reader while voicing her protagonist (and narrator) Abigail Randolph’s hopes, fears and recriminations. Abby is 33, divorced from faithless Clyde, still mourning the death of her mother in an earthquake in India (whence mom had fled with her female lover Henrietta, materfamilias of the Randolphs’ best friends and Cambridge academic-circle neighbors), involved only with the antique shop whose name—A. & C. Eclectibles—keeps reminding her of the vanished Clyde. Abby’s fortunes change when a chamberpot relinquished to her by former girlhood pal Lavinia (Henrietta’s daughter) is identified as the one-time property of poet E.B. Browning (Abby appears on TV’s Antiques Roadshow, and becomes a minor celebrity). This brings out the worst in superefficient martinet Lavinia, who sues for possession of the chamberpot, thus dredging up memories of Abby’s shattered romance with Lavinia’s dreamy brother Ned, who had sworn eternal love, then revealed all Abby’s failures and embarrassments in a crummy autobiographical novel. Abby sulks, overeats, vegetates, wades through legal niceties and intricacies, has an ill-advised fling with a straight-out-of-GQ news reporter, survives the deposition at which she faces down Lavinia and re-encounters repentant Ned, then makes another serendipitous “find,” and emerges—to her amazement—not only unscathed, but happy, for God’s sake. It’s all fairly frothy, and rather overloaded with wisecracks and breathless successions of rhetorical questions. But Medwed briskly depicts the odd world of flea markets and tag sales, and makes of Abby’s arduous liberation (not unlike the invalid Browning’s) an adventure to which Jane Austen might have raised a celebratory glass of port.
A sitcom with heart, and a whole lot of fun.Pub Date: March 14, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-083119-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Connelly takes a break from his Harry Bosch police novels (The Last Coyote, p. 328, etc.) for something even more intense: a reporter's single-minded pursuit of the serial killer who murdered his twin. Even his buddies in the Denver PD thought Sean McEvoy's shooting in the backseat of his car looked like a classic cop suicide, right clown to the motive: his despondency over his failure to clear the murder of a University of Denver student. But as Sean's twin brother, Jack, of the Rocky Mountain News, notices tiny clues that marked Sean's death as murder, his suspicions about the dying message Sean scrawled inside his fogged windshield—"Out of space. Out of time"—alert him to a series of eerily similar killings stretching from Sarasota to Albuquerque. The pattern, Jack realizes, involves two sets of murders: a series of sex killings of children, and then the executions (duly camouflaged as suicides) of the investigating police officers. Armed with what he's dug up, Jack heads off to Washington, to the Law Enforcement Foundation and the FBI. The real fireworks begin as Jack trades his official silence for an inside role in the investigation, only to find himself shut out of both the case and the story. From then on in, Jack, falling hard for Rachel Walling, the FBI agent in charge of the case, rides his Bureau connections like a bucking bronco—even as one William Gladden, a pedophile picked up on a low-level charge in Santa Monica, schemes to make bail before the police can run his prints through the national computer, then waits with sick patience for his chance at his next victim. The long-awaited confrontation between Jack and Gladden comes at an LA video store; but even afterward, Jack's left with devastating questions about the case. Connelly wrings suspense out of every possible aspect of Jack's obsessive hunt for his brother's killer. Prepare to be played like a violin.
Pub Date: Jan. 15, 1996
ISBN: 0-316-15398-2
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
A landmark work of speculative fiction, comparable to A Clockwork Orange, Brave New World, and Russian revolutionary...
Environmental unconcern, genetic engineering, and bioterrorism have created the hollowed-out, haunted future world of Atwood’s ingenious and disturbing 11th novel, bearing several resemblances to The Handmaid’s Tale (1985).
Protagonist Jimmy, a.k.a. “Snowman,” is perhaps the only living “remnant” (i.e., human unaltered by science) in a devastated lunar landscape where he lives by his remaining wits, scavenges for flotsam surviving from past civilizations, dodges man-eating mutant predators, and remembers. In an equally dark parallel narrative, Atwood traces Jimmy’s personal history, beginning with a bonfire in which diseased livestock are incinerated, observed by five-year-old Jimmy and his father, a “genographer” employed by, first, OrganInc Farms, then, the sinister Helthwyzer Corporation. One staggering invention follows another, as Jimmy mourns the departure of his mother (a former microbiologist who clearly foresaw the Armageddon her colleagues were building), goes through intensive schooling with his brilliant best friend Glenn (who renames himself Crake), and enjoys such lurid titillations as computer games that simulate catastrophe and global conflict (e.g., “Extinctathon,” “Kwiktime Osama”) and Web sites featuring popular atrocities (e.g., “hedsoff.com”). Surfing a kiddie-porn site, Jimmy encounters the poignant figure of Oryx, a Southeast Asian girl apprenticed (i.e., sold) to a con-man, then a sex-seller (in sequences as scary and revolting as anything in contemporary fiction). Oryx will inhabit Jimmy’s imagination forever, as will the perverse genius Crake, who rises from the prestigious Watson-Crick Institute to a position of literally awesome power at the RejoovenEsense Compound, where he works on a formula for immortality, creates artificial humans (the “Children of Crake”), and helps produce the virus that’s pirated and used to start a plague that effectively decimates the world’s population. And Atwood (The Blind Assassin, 2000, etc.) brings it all together in a stunning surprise climax.
A landmark work of speculative fiction, comparable to A Clockwork Orange, Brave New World, and Russian revolutionary Zamyatin’s We. Atwood has surpassed herself.Pub Date: May 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50385-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
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