A novel with some nice moments that offers an effective examination of complicated family ties despite its somewhat whiny...
In Peters’ (Peter in Flight, 2013) novel, a young man on the brink of making it big must sort out his complicated family and personal situations.
Hank Hanson has problems that many other people would like to have. At 29, he owns his own boutique greeting-card firm, which has received a multimillion-dollar buyout offer. He has a large extended family, due to his parents’ divorces and remarriages, and they all want to see him for the holidays—or as he terms it, his “annual trial—several long weeks that will test my character and prove my endurance.” Although he’s insecure, he’s still attractive enough for a beautiful woman, Erin Contee, to give him her number. However, it turns out that she has a past that affects other people in his circle. Then, his unreliable father has a financial crisis and a health scare that forces Hank to re-examine his own choices. The author paces his story well and offers some pithy images: when family friends observe the protagonist’s resemblance to his departed mother, he notes “an awkward stir of the emotional sediment that has gone untouched since our last meeting.” Hank, though, is a problematic character. On the one hand, he’s a nice-guy hero who takes care of the people around him; for example, when his siblings won’t help their father, Hank is willing to bail him out, which costs him much time, money, and effort. On the other hand, readers may find his self-pity hard to take, given his mostly enviable position in life. Many people are caught in Hank’s “sandwich generation” and supporting their parents—but with nothing like $17 million to allay expenses. Also, Hank’s tendency to blame women for his own actions reads as if he’s making excuses: “if Midge is this capable of manipulating people to get what she wants, how talented must other women be?” Women manipulate and men make mistakes, in Hank’s view—and it’s a view that calls his good-guy status into question.
A novel with some nice moments that offers an effective examination of complicated family ties despite its somewhat whiny hero.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1505693690
Page Count: 257
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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