A sad but laudable story of a boy who endures more than he should have to bear.
In Ristau’s coming-of-age debut novel, a young boy, distraught over his father’s death, has trouble fitting in at summer camp, where he has unsettling visions and is comforted by a disembodied voice.
By 1976, as America celebrates its bicentennial, 10-year-old Ricky Williamson hasn’t quite recovered from losing his father two years ago. He’s prone to dreams and visions of tragic events, including some that he knows have already happened (such as a train accident) and others that are unfamiliar. Ricky is also less than thrilled when his mother announces that he and his 9-year-old little brother, Danny, will spend five weeks at a summer camp, six hours away from their hometown of South Orange, New Jersey. Danny, a talented baseball player, has no problem making friends, but it’s not as easy for Ricky. Soon, he’s torn between sticking his neck out for a frequently bullied new friend, Miles Romano, and keeping to himself. He finds solace in a voice in his head, which he thinks could be an angel that he saw after nearly drowning at the age of 4. “Have faith,” the voice repeatedly assures him. And faith he’ll surely need as he confronts his fears and suffers a terrible trauma. Ristau’s tale poignantly conveys Ricky’s struggle; the narration, by an older Ricky looking back on his past, retains the persistent and naïve hopefulness of his younger self: “Maybe, just maybe, I could belong to his group.” The scenes of Ricky seeing or hearing his angel, and sometimes his father, are profound but sorrowful. His real-life interactions, too, alternate between effectively upbeat moments and others that are outright depressing, as when Ricky feels that he somehow deserves his misfortunes. Though an early vision boldly validates the protagonist’s dreamlike images (with a future historical event that readers will recognize), the final act is more ambiguous. By the end, Ricky makes a decision that, while offering very little resolution, perfectly sets the stage for a continuing series.
A sad but laudable story of a boy who endures more than he should have to bear.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59298-803-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Beaver's Pond Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
