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
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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