A bit short on narrative energy, but appealingly warmhearted; readers will empathize with the endearing characters and want...
Unmoored by catastrophe, a father takes his daughter and dog to sea in this gentle novel from Orange Prize finalist Roffey (The White Woman on the Green Bicycle, 2011, etc.).
It’s been almost a year since a disastrous flood in Port of Spain, Trinidad, drowned Gavin’s infant son. His wife, Claire, retreated into speechlessness and nearly constant sleep; she is staying with her mother while Gavin and their 6-year-old daughter, Océan, have returned to their rebuilt home. But Gavin keeps falling asleep at work, and Océan sobs for whole nights. They can’t get over their losses in a house filled with memories, Gavin decides; he boards his boat Romany with Océan and their dog Suzy, determined to fulfill his youthful dream of visiting the Galapagos Islands. As they sail west toward the Panama Canal, stops along the way at various islands give Roffey the opportunity to make some pointed observations about wealthy tourists, and she draws a quiet parallel between the legacy of colonialism and her characters’ emotional state: “Recovery takes time; it is the story of the still emerging Caribbean.” Gavin worries at first, as both Océan and Suzy retch with seasickness while he struggles to guide Romany through a squall, that he’s made a terrible mistake; ongoing references to Moby-Dick underscore the sea’s capacity to inflict harm, as does a shipboard fall that leaves Océan with a nasty wound. Island doctors stitch up her leg, and we see father and daughter slowly reawakening to happiness as they experience tranquil days amid the natural beauty of the Caribbean. But the departure of Phoebe, a young woman hired to help with the three-day sail over open seas to Cartegena, reanimates Océan’s anguish over her mother’s abandonment, and father and daughter must endure one more bereavement before their journey ends.
A bit short on narrative energy, but appealingly warmhearted; readers will empathize with the endearing characters and want them to have a happy ending.Pub Date: May 28, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-14-312256-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 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.
