Solar-Tuttle's fledgling effort has a beginning, middle, and end—but otherwise bears little resemblance to a real novel.
Youth-directed imprint’s latest installment: a cringe-inducing first novel tracking a heavy-partying University of Pennsylvania sophomore who undergoes “buzz kill” with existential repercussions while watching Number 6 fumble the football during a Penn-Cornell game.
Rebecca “Beck” Lowe is supposed to be “the one who makes the plans,” the multi-shot drinker at all-night frat bars who can then churn out a paper for her morning class, the full-of-fun entertainer and reluctant virgin who quotes from Jay McInerney's Story of My Life. According to Beck, however, she's also a vulnerable only child harboring deep-seated wounds concerning her working parents' tough-love inattention to her quirkiness. Doesn't her mother owe her an apology for criticizing the paper she wrote comparing Walt Whitman's poetry and Jesse Jackson's speeches, especially since it gained her an A-plus? The problem is, Beck's not sure who she is or is supposed to be, and climbing drunkenly into eager guys' dorm beds every night while waiting for the “one good one” doesn't help her. Will it be Ryan, the tall, well-meaning freshman who lied about his age and never calls? Or totally nice Trey, or solicitous, always-faithful Scott, or one of their helpful best friends? When Beck sees Number 6 fumble at the big game, she feels the magnitude of other people's expectations and the irksome weight of having to “sit down and think about things.” “I'm like this cliché fall-apart girl crying under the vines,” reads a typical breast-beating passage of this adolescent diary. Unfortunately, the author's slangy, pedestrian prose can't compel a reader to care one way or the other about her character's growing pangs.
Solar-Tuttle's fledgling effort has a beginning, middle, and end—but otherwise bears little resemblance to a real novel.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7434-2851-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: MTV Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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