Devastatingly powerful scenes trapped in a rickety plot.
An unflinching look at sexual abuse from an author who isn’t afraid of difficult subjects.
When Bobbie ran away from home at 15, she intended to go back—as soon as the man who was molesting her moved out of her widowed mother’s house. Then Bobbie’s mom married Bobbie’s rapist, and Bobbie just kept running. Thirty years later, she returns to Maryland for one reason: to bring charges against the man who abused her. Having written popular novels about autism (Daniel Isn’t Talking, 2006) and early death (Dying Young, 1989), Leimbach is no stranger to tough topics. As she shifts back and forth in time—alternating between 1978 and 2008—she offers a horribly believable depiction of a child ensnared by a predator. In giving a voice to Bobbie’s mother as well as Bobbie, she foregoes the urge to simply blame a woman who failed to protect her daughter. However, this novel isn’t quite as deft as some of the writer’s other work. At several critical points, the plot depends on coincidence and actions that strain credulity. For example, on Bobbie's first night back in Maryland, as she’s waiting to testify against her abuser, her mother shows up at the isolated guesthouse where she's staying. Not only does her mother—and, most likely, her mother’s husband—know where she is, but Bobbie also has reason to suspect that her mother got word of her whereabouts from the innkeeper. Bobbie doesn’t even consider finding other, safer accommodations. This rather astonishing lapse in judgment only makes sense in that it’s necessary for setting up a climactic scene. Some readers may admire the way in which Leimbach essentially abandons the court case that provides her story’s scaffolding—the criminal justice system doesn’t always provide a satisfying conclusion—while others are likely to find that the author has broken a narrative contract.
Devastatingly powerful scenes trapped in a rickety plot.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-54087-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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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