A powerfully drawn but ultimately disappointing look at the ongoing obstacles facing LGBTQ youth as they come of age.
For five queer 20-somethings living in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, figuring out how to be fully functioning adults is complicated by homophobia, self-doubt, and economic instability.
Fia, just coming out, has fallen head over heels for Sara. Having recently left Peter, her boyfriend of three years, she's crashing at the apartment of an acquaintance named Arnaq. For her part, Arnaq is a mess—an abused alcoholic who is unable to hold a job. Arnaq seeks solace anywhere she can find it, flitting from bar to party and hooking up with anyone who will have her. At present, Inuk, Fia’s younger brother, is estranged from Arnaq, though they were once best friends, because she outed him against his wishes. This so mortified Inuk that he’s fled to Denmark, where he’s in hiding from both himself and the world—fearful that he’ll be ostracized and derided once the name of his sexual partner becomes known. He communicates with Fia via email and text message—these missives are woven into this unconventionally written narrative—to reveal profound self-hate, desperation, and shame. It’s heartbreaking. Meanwhile, Fia is so besotted that her concern for her brother is tempered by happily-ever-after fantasies about Sara. Sara, however, is living with her girlfriend, Ivik, and while the pair are having difficulties, it’s unclear if they’ll stay together or break up. Sound like a soap opera? It is. But it is also more than this. Tender, evocative, and pithy, this debut novel creates a vivid picture of people struggling for authenticity and voice. At the same time, loose ends prevail, perhaps a reflection of the characters' own lack of resolution but frustrating nonetheless since it’s impossible to predict whether they’ll succumb to despair or find fulfillment.
A powerfully drawn but ultimately disappointing look at the ongoing obstacles facing LGBTQ youth as they come of age.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2877-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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
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
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