Thoughtful work, but Youmans’s restrained, polished, and admirably unsentimental prose distances her characters from readers...
A slave girl and a young Confederate soldier experience pain and loss, in an elegantly written Civil War novel by the author of Catherwood (1996).
Unaware that it's become habit, a soldier softly sings the old nursery rhyme “Who Killed Cock Robin?” whenever he goes into battle. So his comrades call him Robin and are somehow cheered by the tune’s homeliness, as well as by the young man’s consistent show of quiet courage. The year is 1864, and there have been a lot of battles: many, too many, opportunities for Robin to exhibit that courage. In the meantime, back home, a smaller drama unfolds. Agate Freebody is a sensitive, intelligent slave girl savagely treated by a brute of a plantation owner. On the point of being sold, Agate gets a rare lucky break. Slave merchant Tucker Cobb, fat and feckless, leaves her untended long enough for Agate to make contact with a woman who happens to be passing by—and who happens to be Robin's mother. Aemelia and Agate have only minutes to establish a connection and contrive the plan that results in the slave’s escape. With Agate's secret cache of gold coins, Aemelia buys her, takes her home, gives her harborage and, shortly thereafter, freedom. The women become close, a process hastened, perhaps, by the recent death of Aemelia's daughter. She grieves, longs for the safe return of her only son. The bloody war continues, however, though its last act is now foreseeable. Robin is captured and shipped to the infamous prison camp in Elmira, New York: “Helmira” to the unfortunates held there. Robin's and Agate's stories run parallel, the one relentlessly bleak, the other possibly redemptive.
Thoughtful work, but Youmans’s restrained, polished, and admirably unsentimental prose distances her characters from readers yearning to be moved.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-29195-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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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