Not a bad soap opera, some nicely drawn characters and a sharp bitter edge, but rambling: takes much too long to cut to the...
Coming-of-age tale by second-novelist Fromm (How All This Started, 2000, etc.), this about the rocky adolescence of a feisty Montana girl with an absent dad and floozy mom.
Lucy Diamond, a high-school freshman, has just overdosed on her own hormones and is intent on getting whatever she can out of life as soon as she possibly can. She has a boyfriend named Kenny, a nice enough kid who lives with his divorced mother and sees his own father even less than Lucy sees hers. He takes—or, rather, he’s offered—Lucy’s virginity, but theirs is more an alliance of kindred souls than of ardent lovers. Both are equally disillusioned with their parents, who seem entirely incapable of offering anything remotely resembling a good example to their children: Lucy’s father lives on the road and thinks his responsibilities to his wife and daughter can be fulfilled with a regular check in the mail; Lucy’s mother lectures her daughter about venereal diseases while seeing other men on the sly, and Kenny’s father is a drunk. Kenny’s mother freaks when she discovers that Lucy and her son are having sex, and she connives to have Kenny’s custody transferred to his father to get him away from her. Disgusted and vaguely heartbroken, Lucy responds to Kenny’s exile by sleeping with the first boy she can find—and, no surprise, he turns out to be an insensitive thug. Eventually, fate deals her the kindest hand possible under the circumstances when her mother abandons her to run off to Mexico with some guy while Lucy’s father is in Canada. Left on her own, Lucy begins to take some responsibility for her life. Too bad she couldn’t give lessons to the grownups.
Not a bad soap opera, some nicely drawn characters and a sharp bitter edge, but rambling: takes much too long to cut to the chase.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-30775-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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