Sherman’s insider knowledge illuminates this compassionate character study.
In her debut novel, social worker Sherman (Jailed, 2011) paints a vivid portrait of an older homeless woman in custody on a psychiatric ward.
Mary Motter, once a veterans hospital social worker, now lives on the streets of Oakland, California. One day, drunk and stoned, Mary stumbles upon an abandoned baby outside a hospital. As hallucinations blend with memories of her own baby daughter, given up for adoption five decades ago, Mary feels an overwhelming compulsion to bury the tiny corpse. When she wakes up, though, she is handcuffed in a hospital psychiatric ward: Police tell her the baby was alive when it arrived at the hospital. The next two months are a nightmare of trials, interviews and neurologist appointments as Mary and her lawyers fight involuntary manslaughter charges. Mary’s first-person voice is instantly distinctive, both witty and forthright: “My blisters have blisters. I’m parched as hell.” She seems to blend her past and present; her mother’s funeral, her rebellious adolescence and out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and scenes from her marriages are just as intense as day-to-day hospital life. Sherman ably alternates reminiscences (often dredged up by the sight or smell of food) and present-day action, recording Mary’s confused thoughts and fostering sympathy for this unreliable narrator. The author’s professional experience translates into believable passages detailing group therapy sessions and two patient suicides. She also uses, to good effect, birds as metaphors of lost innocence and crushed hopes. Mary’s matter-of-fact statements about her predicament, however, sometimes lack subtlety: “I was disregarded and discounted….I can’t believe what’s happened to me…the abuse, neglect, not caring.” Readers will most likely empathize with Mary despite occasional emotional browbeating—though they may wish the novel explained precisely how she descended into homelessness.
Sherman’s insider knowledge illuminates this compassionate character study.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1496071972
Page Count: 222
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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