Despite its flaws, an engrossing novel about a dysfunctional family, well suited for the beach.
A matriarch’s 75th birthday in 1985 sparks a family reunion, and the up-rooting of a few long-buried secrets.
This debut novel offers a reversal-of-fortune saga about a family from Philadelphia’s Main Line —an enclave of the city’s suburbs defined by old wealth and extravagant mansions. As the story opens, Dolly Scott has just been arrested in the middle of the night for trespassing on the grounds of the Hilltop Country Club, caught apparently trying to dig up a box of jewelry she had buried on the property decades earlier when it was still part of her grand estate, known as Llantrisant. Dolly, whose money was stolen by her husband, Dixon, before he ran off with his mistress, now lives in the former gatehouse of that estate. Meanwhile, the youngest of the three Scott offspring has been locked up in the pricy West Lawn mental sanitarium. The tale moves back and forth between 1985 and the 1950s (the decade during which the Scott family’s dysfunction gradually culminates in its ultimate downfall). Rhea writes the 1985 sections in the first-person voice of Dolly’s older daughter Hillary Scott Sherman, while the tales from the ’50s, which make up the great bulk of the narrative, are delivered in the third-person. The technique almost works, but with Hillary remaining the central protagonist, there is initially a discordant feel to the switch in voice, especially because she is the one who leads the reader into the retrospective by saying: “I slipped into a reverie about the old days. I guess you could say…the start of it all, was the day my brother [Trip] found our younger sister, Penny, locked in the tennis court.” But emerging from that point on is an engaging, well-delivered story that includes parental neglect, shattered egos, love, death, betrayal, and emotional fragility. Along the way, readers are treated to a blistering behind-the-scenes portrait of the lifestyles of Philadelphia’s socially elite. A concluding chapter, “Wrap-up,” is unsatisfyingly brief, but it does offer a surprise final twist. Unfortunately, it also leaves a couple of recurring questions about Dixon’s past unanswered.
Despite its flaws, an engrossing novel about a dysfunctional family, well suited for the beach.Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5174-1538-9
Page Count: 302
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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