A smart and uplifting tale of personal and musical renewal; an impressive debut.
Tragedy puts a young flutist on a new and challenging path.
When readers first meet Elizabeth Morgan, the main character in Minger’s first novel, she’s a promising young classical flute player with plenty of talent and even more ambition. She dreams of the limelight even though she knows that the spotlight seldom shines on wind instrument virtuosos. Her stepmother, “Madly,” is a successful art connoisseur, and her father, David, has published “five lavish collections of photography in the last fourteen years.” But the parental influence of most lasting import in the tale is posthumous: Liz’s mother, Margaret, who gave up a much-admired career as an opera singer when she became a mother (as Minger prettily puts it: “The next year Margaret Moran had handed her career back to the gods who had bestowed it upon her, and Liz had been born”). Liz is consumed by her hunger for fame, but her dreams are destroyed when she’s involved in a horrific car crash and her hands are injured. Despite “artificial joints, reconstructed tendons, grafted nerves,” the damage won't heal completely, and Liz is forced to contemplate a life without flute playing. It doesn’t soften her flinty personality—Minger does a very subtle and remarkable job of creating a pitiable protagonist without making her sympathetic—nor does it long quash her drive, which resurfaces, now attached to following in her mother’s footsteps and entering the opera world. The author describes that sphere and its outsized personalities with fluid readability, handling the abundant technical and insider details so naturally that readers should feel educated rather than excluded. Liz moves from America to Wales and auditions for opera productions with a company in Cardiff, where she meets Giles Offeryn, the troupe’s brilliant and charismatic music director. Throughout the book’s expertly paced latter half, the increasing romantic sparks between Liz and Giles alternate with the behind-the-scenes tensions of the soprano facing one demanding stage role after another. The result is a thoroughly adult-feeling romance plot with an unforgettable main character set in an absorbingly realized world of performance art.
A smart and uplifting tale of personal and musical renewal; an impressive debut.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63152-093-8
Page Count: 376
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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