A powerful historical novel that offers a remarkable meditation on the persistence of racial hatred.
Three intersecting stories spanning a century revolve around racial tension in a small Kansas town.
The major plotlines in this book are divided by time but united by geography, as all three are set in the small city of Osawatomie, Kansas. One story—which functions as the spine of the narrative—begins in 1854, and is narrated by Sarah Dawson, whose Caucasian family moved from Tennessee to score some land opened up by the Kansas-Nebraska Act. However, tensions between those in favor of slavery and those opposed to it roil the area and force the Dawsons, who’ve never owned slaves, to take sides. Then the abolitionist agitator John Brown moves to town, spoiling for a fight and adding fuel to an already simmering fire. Sarah begins a romantic relationship with Brown’s son, Oliver, and soon becomes pregnant. In 1954, a young white boy, John David, navigates his school’s social scene, which has been transformed into a political tinderbox by the era’s racial conflict. Fast-forward to late 1960, as John David and his bigoted white friend Woody pick up a peripatetic African-American woman looking to find money to get her brother out of jail. Debut author Signor subtly constructs a world that’s infused with fear and volatility. In the 1954 storyline, for instance, John David has a close African-American friend, Jaimie, whose father languishes in jail, and another classmate’s house gets burned down. He also employs prose that describes his world with poetical grace: “You didn’t have to be a full-grown man or woman to know that things were stirred up. It seemed like just about everyone’s skin was on their faces a little tighter, their eyes quicker to dart around.” The story can be confusing at times, however, as the author switches narrative perspectives and time frames too often and too quickly. Overall, though, this is a bold work that’s richly and intelligently drawn.
A powerful historical novel that offers a remarkable meditation on the persistence of racial hatred.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63505-567-2
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Mill City Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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