A heart-wrenching tale of love enduring all things in the face of evil.
When Tom Hope, a practical sheep farmer in 1960s Australia, married Hannah Babel, a twice-widowed Auschwitz survivor many years his senior, not everyone thought it was a good idea.
But then again, Tom was easily swayed by women. His first wife, Trudy, had left him. Twice. The first time, she returned pregnant with another man’s child. The second time, she joined a Christian commune, saddling Tom with raising her son, Peter. Tom and Peter became an amicable pair, herding sheep, pruning trees, and fixing engines together. So when Trudy returned two years later to claim Peter, it nearly broke both Tom, who refused to live alone again, and Peter, who had no love for this mother he didn’t know, much less the Jesus Camp. Luckily, for Tom, Hannah comes to town, eager to open a bookstore. She hires Tom to help renovate the old shop building, and the two quickly become lovers. Although Hannah has survived the Holocaust, the memories of those she lost, including her son, Michael, haunt her. Meanwhile, unluckily for Peter, the pastor in charge of Jesus Camp is a controlling patriarch who believes heartily in thrashing the spirit of God into misbehaving boys, especially those who run away, like Peter. And although Tom would gladly fight to keep Peter, both the law and Hannah are against him, for Peter isn't Tom’s biological son, and Hannah can't bear to love a boy again, a boy who could be lost just as Michael was. Can Tom and Hannah find a way to bring Peter home? Hillman (The Boy in the Green Suit, 2008, etc.) crafts a compelling tale, toggling among Tom’s, Hannah’s, and Peter’s perspectives, as he delineates the stripping of each heart and draws together the ties that bind them together again.
A heart-wrenching tale of love enduring all things in the face of evil.Pub Date: April 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-53592-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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
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