Captivating for both its unusual detail and observant take on teenage trust. Curious and delightful.
An Ethiopian-American teenager falls under the spell of a mysterious man from her community who runs a small empire out of his parking lot.
Tamirat’s debut novel stutters a bit at the beginning, wanting to remain vague; its unnamed narrator, a teenage girl from Boston, is with her Ethiopian immigrant father on a subtropical island referred to only as “B——.” It’s unclear why they are there or why there is so much conflict between them. But in the second chapter, as the narrator begins to describe their previous life in Boston and a shrewd, shadowy trickster named Ayale, the novel gains a steadier footing as well as a sense of humor and a keen view of teenage preoccupations. Ayale, a fellow Ethiopian who runs the parking lot and who allows the girl to hang around after school, bends her infatuation to his nefarious business practices. He begins to send her on errands and ingratiate himself with her. “I feel as though I’m carrying Ayale with me at all times,” she says as her idolatry blooms, “although for whom and for what reason escapes me. The weight is often unbearable, but I am terrified of what would happen if I were to let go completely.” Tamirat walks a fine and observant line—the relationship between the narrator and Ayale isn’t sexual, but it has the hallmarks of risky teenage admiration. The narrator’s father is rightly concerned about the “near-pathological ways in which Ayale bound people to him, trapping them in a web of debt from which they could never escape. This, according to him, was Ayale’s version of creating love.” Tamirat writes blind teenage devotion well, but what seems initially to be a story about a forbidden relationship becomes much more: Ayale’s empire is less a metaphor for his power in the Boston neighborhood and more an actual dream of domination on the world scene—a dream that the narrator features more prominently in than she could imagine. In the end, the narrator says “none of us got what we wanted”—except, maybe, the reader.
Captivating for both its unusual detail and observant take on teenage trust. Curious and delightful.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-12850-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
PROFILES
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
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