Wonderfully perceptive and precise about an age that’s too often portrayed in vague generalities.
With sensitivity and quiet wit, O. Henry Award–winner Swann delineates the turmoil of adolescence.
Maya and Roe are both misfits at their posh boarding school in the suburbs of New York City. Roe is a scholarship student from the South, raised by her strict military father after a car hit and killed her mother. Maya, whose tuition is being paid by her wealthy, dissolute grandmother, grew up in rural isolation with an unmarried mother who rejected her privileged background. The 16-year-olds bond over their passion for books—Roe loves Russian novels; Maya’s favorite is Jane Eyre—and their alienation from the other girls: “They’re like a spectacle we’re watching. We only want to spend time among ourselves.” First-novelist Swann captures with marvelous clarity the sense young adults have of waiting for “life” to begin, of searching for clues as to who they might be. Roe and Maya buy clothes in thrift shops, trying on outfits the way they try on identities. They spend Saturdays in Manhattan, intoxicated by a city in which “the gap between desire and action narrows and, at certain moments, simply falls away.” A highly alcoholic Christmas with Maya’s grandmother, the book’s funniest, scariest section, suggests that living wholly by desire’s imperatives may not be such a good idea. But both girls rush toward experience anyway, seeking to overcome their anxieties. Narrator Maya, who confesses to being scared of people, embarks on a love affair with Arthur, a 32-year-old art writer. Roe, whose deepest fear is “that something will happen . . . an accident or tragedy of some kind,” gets involved with Jesse, a troubled local boy who beats her up. Summer vacations with their respective men are equal though different disasters (not quite as sharply conceived as the scenes that precede them) from which the girls emerge slightly battered but stronger. “Life, we’ve agreed, has definitely started.”
Wonderfully perceptive and precise about an age that’s too often portrayed in vague generalities.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-28802-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
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
© Copyright 2026 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.
