Stirring, romantic and evocative of the sea’s magic.
A disgraced lawyer finds friends and purpose on the island of Ocracoke in North Carolina when he gets the chance to help refurbish and race a mysterious schooner.
Aidan Sharpe was a shining star and partner in his Raleigh law firm until, trying to cover for a fellow attorney, he makes a serious error in judgment that loses him his law license. Aidan’s mentor advises him to visit an old Navy buddy, Father Marcus, on Ocracoke. The pitch is: “He enjoys the company of washed up, self-loathing bastards like yourself. He could also use someone’s help around the rectory.” Marcus cares deeply for his parishioners, but he isn’t perfect himself, leading the island’s AA meetings while enjoying nightly visits to bottles of leftover Communion wine he’s buried around the beach. Aidan soon acquires more friends, including Molly McGregor, a towboat operator, and an enemy, Rowdy Ponteau, a rich-kid deadbeat who attacked Molly in a local bar. At sea, the group finds a strange schooner more than a century old. A plan develops to repair the Prodigal and race her against Ponteau’s crew. Hurley (Once Upon a Gypsy Moon, 2013, etc.) writes an intriguing, well-plotted and multilayered novel whose heroes are interestingly flawed. In various ways, they struggle with faith, whether in God or other human beings. The supernatural elements—a religious relic, a gypsy woman out of legend—are thoughtfully handled. Hurley writes beautifully, especially in depicting nautical and island life: “The shake-shingle cottages in the village were gnarled and weathered, and each year their frames bent lower to the mossy earth, like old washerwomen….The island itself seemed slump-shouldered and in need of a haircut and a hot bath.” In a few instances, Hurley overdoes the sweetness (real alcoholism is a serious disease, not a lovable weakness), but in most cases, he balances affection with tough-mindedness. The work satisfyingly explores several themes: mystery, genuine teamwork, adventure and love.
Stirring, romantic and evocative of the sea’s magic.Pub Date: May 28, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482694277
Page Count: 358
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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.
