A compassionate and beautifully crafted cautionary tale with memorable protagonists; cold seawater practically drips from...
In this debut novel, the devastation in New York and New Jersey resulting from Superstorm Sandy forever alters one family.
By the time Sandy rolled up the New Jersey and Long Island coastlines on Oct. 29, 2012, she wasn’t even a hurricane anymore. Yet the convergence of the Atlantic storm surge, high tides, overflowing rivers and bays from relentless rain, and the still-substantial winds swamped the homes and villages of thousands of Atlantic seaside dwellers. Ricky and Sherry Buono, in their late 60s, are having breakfast in their condo on one of New York’s barrier islands when Sandy begins her assault. In their second bedroom is Terry, the baby granddaughter they recently adopted from their younger daughter, Jessie, who took off for the Rocky Mountains. They have been through major storms before. When Sherry urges Ricky not to go into his Manhattan office for the day, he cheerfully reminds her he must work. Down on the Jersey shore, the Buonos’ older daughter, Cammie, and their son-in-law, Artie Reily, aren’t overly concerned. They too have weathered storms and electrical outages. They and their teenage son, Lee, go to sleep in their darkened home Monday night, having no idea that the floodwaters have begun filling the first level of their house. Illo, an architect and structural engineer, employs his keen eye for detail to provide vibrant explanations of storm dynamics and to develop rich character portrayals in a novel filled with the everyday moments and drama of ordinary human existence. As Sandy rages, the author takes his time to skillfully create small novellas within the larger work. Even the storm becomes a strong main character through Illo’s evocative prose: Sandy “only did what it was meant to do and it took up only the energy that our planet freely gave to it. This system carried no intention about where or how its energy would be unleashed.” He lingers a bit too long on technical matters of physics, but patient readers will be rewarded with important lessons.
A compassionate and beautifully crafted cautionary tale with memorable protagonists; cold seawater practically drips from the pages.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-975913-33-5
Page Count: 340
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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