Lyrical and leisurely. Nothing new, but as comfortable as old jeans.
Heartfelt sequel to The Second Coming of Lucy Hatch (2002).
Spending a morning in bed with her true love, Ash Farrell, cabinetmaker and country-western singer, is Lucy’s idea of heaven on earth. Seems nothing can go wrong in their sunny little patch of northeast Texas—until Ash’s teenage daughter Denny gets dumped on his doorstep by her hard-hearted mother. On top of this sudden change, Lucy can’t imagine what will happen when he finds out that she’s unexpectedly pregnant—she’d assumed that she was infertile, since her husband, who died in an accident six months earlier, had always blamed her. He must have been wearing his boxers a tad too tight—but they hardly ever had sex anyway. Lucy’s at sixes and sevens, wondering what to do and when—or if—to tell Ash. Then Denny happens to overhear her talking about it to a friend, and the girl assumes that she wants an abortion. Well, no, Lucy’s not sure. Now that Ash and his daughter are discovering that they share a talent for making music, maybe there’s no place for her. She’ll have to run away to her own little house and think it over, leaving the Farrells to get to know each other at last. Like any country musician, Ash has big dreams about going to Nashville someday, with or without Denny. But there’s work to do first: someone has to explore the secrets of the past, this being women’s fiction. And the someone is Denny, who connects with the grandmother she never knew and learns why Evelyn gave Ash away when he was a little boy: she was the victim of vicious abuse from her husband and mentally ill to boot. But the tough old lady teaches Denny a few things about love and fishing, and eases the girl’s troubled heart, who finds that happiness is right in her own backyard.
Lyrical and leisurely. Nothing new, but as comfortable as old jeans.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-008163-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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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