While missing and murdered children have become a staple of popular fiction, Gershow keeps her approach fresh thanks to...
In her first novel, Gershow explores the emotional toll on the surviving sibling of an abducted teenager.
Fifteen-year-old Lydia is a brainy nerd obsessed with geopolitics. Her older brother Danny is the popular jock. When he goes missing in August 1995, Lydia’s parents are understandably overcome with grief and obsessed with finding him. Danny has been their favorite, or at least the one they could relate to more easily than dourly serious Lydia. Two years ahead of her in high school, Danny has treated Lydia with contempt for years. But when Lydia reads the outrageously misspelled note he wrote to a girl in one of his classes, she remembers the brother he was back in grade school. Academically challenged, he was also endearingly vulnerable, with an easygoing humor that cemented the family together. But then, after he finished ninth grade (for the first time), the family moved and Danny reinvented himself. Thanks to a sudden growth spurt and intense working out, he repeated ninth grade in his new school with a charisma and athletic prowess that made up for academic deficits. Despite brief flashes of his old sweetness, he was often mean to Lydia. Now his jock friends, who genuinely adored Danny, adopt her. Drawn into the popular, fast crowd, she abandons her geeky friend, loyal David. Meanwhile, Lydia’s desperate parents hire a private detective. Lydia admires Denis’s hard-boiled approach and answers his probing questions honestly. She develops a crush on him until she realizes his interest derives from suspicion. Eventually, Danny’s body is found, and the sad facts of his murder revealed. However, Lydia does not come to a real understanding of her brother’s death, and life, until her high-school reunion ten years later.
While missing and murdered children have become a staple of popular fiction, Gershow keeps her approach fresh thanks to Lydia’s disarmingly unsentimental narrative voice, which allows Danny to be more than a saintly victim.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52761-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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