Be prepared to shed a tear or two.
No doubt about it, Scottish author Macleod is a master storyteller who plumbs the breadth and depth of emotions in this inspiring debut about a young black girl whose direction in life is defined by her inner strength and courage.
Arletta Johnson lives an insular existence in a small cabin near Brouillette, La., in the early 1900s, which she shares with her Mambo, the local voodoo priestess. They have a volatile relationship, and Arletta’s comments and actions often bring thwacks from her mother, who abandons her at home as she spends time drinking with boyfriends or using her voodoo to help the neighbors. Arletta fondly remembers her grandpa, the stabilizing influence in her life, who taught her to read and encouraged her to make something of herself. She cherishes his tin box, containing papers and his old wooden pipe, which she keeps buried near the shack. But being left alone in the cabin endangers Arletta in ways that Mambo never imagines: Two white pedophiles often visit Arletta while Mambo is gone and brutally rape and threaten her to keep her silence. After each vicious encounter, Arletta cleanses herself in a nearby creek, and it’s there, as she contemplates drowning herself, that she first hears a disembodied voice named Nellie who sings to her and encourages her to remain strong. When she’s 10, Mambo finally sends Arletta to school, where she excels and becomes friends with another young girl, Safi. But before Arletta’s 15th birthday, she and Safi find themselves working in a cotton mill and boarding with a sympathetic white widow and her black employee. Mambo and Arletta’s relationship changes as joyous events and misfortune touch their lives, but it’s the news that another young girl has been brutally assaulted by one of Arletta’s former attackers that ultimately unites mother and daughter in a single-minded purpose—and which permanently alters the path of Arletta’s life. Macleod brilliantly hooks the reader from beginning to end with a narrative that opens a floodgate of emotions and overflows with unforgettable characters.
Be prepared to shed a tear or two.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-78074-234-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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
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
© 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.
