Longer and rather more drawn out than it needs to be, but a good account of friendship and loss, freshly narrated with a...
The slow emotional thaw of a 53-year-old widow who manages to reorder her life post-husband, thanks to a troubled granddaughter and an embittered AIDS patient.
Center stage in Manfredi’s first novel (stories: Where Love Leaves Us, 1994) is Boston medical technician Anna, once a happily married woman whose life revolved for years around her husband Hugh and their daughter Poppy. But now, with Hugh several years dead of cancer and Poppy living in Alaska, Anna has to build a new world for herself. So she moves to a new house and takes up some new activities, agreeing to help coordinate a support group for AIDS patients. Then, after 12 years’ estrangement, Anna gets a phone call from Poppy asking if she can come to visit with her husband Marvin and their daughter Flynn. Anna is a bit nervous about the reunion with her daughter, but it turns out to be a false alarm: Poppy never shows. But Marvin does, bringing Flynn in tow and explaining that he and Poppy have broken up. So Anna takes them in and tries to provide a stable home for Flynn, a charming and eccentric ten-year-old who talks to spirits, has perfect pitch, and believes that India is a planet. Anna makes the mistake of bringing Marvin along to her support group, where he meets and begins an affair with her young assistant Christine. The group comes to play an increasingly large role in Anna’s domestic life after she connects with a patient named Jack. Caustic and deeply angry, Jack softens with time and eventually becomes Anna’s close friend. Together, this oddball collection of emotional cripples manages to work their way through the thickets of everyday life with good humor and a decent hope of survival.
Longer and rather more drawn out than it needs to be, but a good account of friendship and loss, freshly narrated with a minimum of stereotypes and some sharply drawn characters.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2004
ISBN: 1-931561-59-1
Page Count: 344
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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