Berman’s debut recalls the beloved teen and adult novels of Judy Blume, both in topic and prose style: simple, powerful,...
Stormy emotional weather and unforeseen events rock a summer camp in the Berkshires.
In a pair of chapters set in 2000 that form a prelude to this novel, we meet Rachel and Fiona at 13. Rachel is the daughter of a struggling single mom, born as the result of her mother’s longtime affair with a married man; summers at Camp Marigold are one of the few benefits her largely absent father offers to his secret second family. Fiona, from a much wealthier background (her parents met at Marigold when they were 9), has been Rachel’s best friend since she started there. The rest of the book takes place in 2006, and its 12 chapters rotate among these characters and other counselors and campers. First up is Fiona’s younger sister, Helen, who makes and loses a good friend in the latter part of seventh grade. Fortunately, she has camp to look forward to. Fiona, now at college in Connecticut and miserable about gaining the freshman 15, and Rachel, who goes to the University of Michigan and looks better than ever, are both back as counselors. Yonatan from Israel and Chad from the U.K. are among those who go to a Super-8 motel to party with them on their day off. Sheera, one of the only nonwhite campers, is at camp on scholarship and will never quite blend in…and then a shocking accident causes her to go home before summer’s end. The fallout from that event casts a shadow over the rest of the summer, deeply affecting British counselors Mo and Nell as well as Rachel and Fiona. Meanwhile, the camp director, Jack, divorced and lonely, will find that partying with the counselors isn’t such a great idea. Despite the escalating problems, neither the characters nor the reader will be prepared for what happens on the last day of the season.
Berman’s debut recalls the beloved teen and adult novels of Judy Blume, both in topic and prose style: simple, powerful, unafraid to confront serious issues.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-58931-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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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