An affecting novel about the duality of hope and despair.
The intersecting lives of six people living in Jerusalem and in need of organ transplants are chronicled in Wolf’s emotionally charged novel.
Twenty-one-year-old Leah Weiss is one of eight siblings, all of whom grow up in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Jerusalem. She suffers from chronic kidney disease and as a result regularly undergoes dialysis, exhausted and demoralized by her rapidly worsening condition. Her former fiance, Moshe, leaves her to wed Leah’s best friend Bassie. Leah’s mother Hindy obsessively tries to find her a husband, even hiding the fact that she’s “damaged goods” to increase her prospects. Another character, Yael Glassman, suffers from chronic lung disease—as a single mom, she frets anxiously about the future of her young daughter, Tikva. Here, she reflects melancholically on the profound allure of leading a normal life: “How lucky she was to have gotten a double lung transplant nine years ago, and to have lived for a few years magically believing she would always be a healthy person. To have traveled, fallen in love, had a baby. And yet…how cruel it was, to tease her with those years.” Now, she needs yet another transplant, a predicament shared by five other characters whose lives become entangled in various ways despite their diverse backgrounds (some are Jewish, some Muslim, and one, Father Severin McConnell, is a Catholic priest). Israel is a uniquely difficult country in which to obtain a new organ, given the prohibitively strict religious rules against the desecration of the body; these restrictions affect all of the protagonists. In the background of the medical drama is the eruption of extraordinary political violence, which serves to terrify some characters and send others into despair—but it also furnishes a measure of redemptive hope, since the death of some could mean the survival of others waiting for organs. Here and there, Wolf comes perilously close to a lachrymose sentimentality but never fully commits that literary sin, always maintaining an impressive authorial restraint. The result is a deeply poignant narrative.
An affecting novel about the duality of hope and despair.Pub Date: March 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781958762134
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Arbitrary Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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