This cat’s cradle of characters and storylines—in which intersections are sometimes fleeting, sometimes acute, sometimes...
“There is the surface, and there is everything underneath” might be the motto of these 11 connected stories following the lives of students from a New Jersey high school into their 30s.
In 1996, 15-year-old Tess naively yearns to save her adored older brother from moving into a halfway house after a stint in rehab his senior year. In realizing she can’t protect him, Tess establishes newcomer Groves’ theme: how coping with the loss of innocence forms a person. Menacing male figures, dead-end jobs, and drug use are reoccurring motifs. The storytelling is not straightforward; it follows no chronology and moves among different contexts and viewpoints. In her 20s, first-grade teacher Amelia avoids dark suspicions concerning her husband by following random news stories, including one about weird Sally from high school running for mayor. Sally seems less weird than sad as a lonely freshman going to desperate measures to befriend popular senior Leslie. And Sally is irrelevant to Leslie’s emotional disintegration in the years after she graduates. Meanwhile, Amelia has abandoned teaching and marriage for waitressing by the time she runs across former classmate James; the dangerously sexy senior on whom Tess’ friend Margo had a crush has become a painfully lonely 35-year-old accountant. Margo, whose adolescence was disrupted by the dissolution of her parents’ marriage, unleashes her repressed rage at her 22nd birthday party. She particularly lashes out at her needy friend Rae, clueless about the trauma readers will later learn Rae suffered after a robbery and rape attempt, a trauma parallel to one Amelia’s ex-sister-in-law, Corrine, handles with a different set of emotional apparatus. Teachers, as parents, also enter the mix. School counselor Mark watches his life collapse after his daughter’s kidnapping in the particularly moving story “Grieving a Life of Water.” By the 20th high school reunion that Tess attends with her brother, futures remain uncertain but not hopeless.
This cat’s cradle of characters and storylines—in which intersections are sometimes fleeting, sometimes acute, sometimes permanent—deftly exposes the challenges, and terrors, of becoming an adult.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-943491-15-5
Page Count: 198
Publisher: BkMk/Univ. of Missouri-Kansas City
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
