Another intelligent and engrossing tale of Tudor England from Gregory (The Other Boleyn Girl, 2002, etc.).
It’s 1553, and a teenaged girl with a dangerous secret is caught up in royal intrigue as she tries to serve a scheming lord, an unhappy queen, and the queen’s ambitious sister.
As Edward VI, only male heir of Henry VIII, lies dying, 14-year-old Hannah Green is helping her father in his London printing and bookshop. Because young girls are not supposed to set print or deliver books, she’s dressed in boy’s clothing, but that’s not Hannah’s only secret. She and her father are Spanish Jews who fled the Inquisition after her mother was burned as a heretic. Finding refuge in Protestant England, the Greens observe Christian rituals in public, but privately they still honor the old ways. One day Hannah attracts the attention of a shop customer, handsome Lord Dudley, by innocently revealing that she has the gift of second sight—a particularly useful gift in these uncertain times, when it seems that Protestant Edward will be succeeded by Catholic Mary. Hannah becomes an aide to Lord Dudley, who recommends her to the young king to be his Fool. While serving Edward, she follows Dudley’s orders to attend and spy upon the king’s older sister Mary, whom she grows to love. When Mary becomes Queen, Hannah attends her at court, but (again at Dudley’s request) also makes contact with her sister Elizabeth. Hannah admires the young princess’s courage as Elizabeth faces losing her life when Mary starts burning Protestants as heretics. Her loyalties divided, fearful that she and her father are vulnerable in Catholic England, Hannah relies on her wits to survive threats, intrigue, and danger. She must also decide whether she will marry Daniel, a family friend, to whom she is officially betrothed. Tudor England is not a merry place, but Hannah is no fool.
Another intelligent and engrossing tale of Tudor England from Gregory (The Other Boleyn Girl, 2002, etc.).Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-4607-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
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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