An engaging and unusual story—a debut with promise.
A curious novel blending family drama and supernatural events.
Tragedy strikes when Karen Barrett and her three-year-old daughter, Sherry, are hit by a truck. Karen’s injuries are minor, but Sherry sustains a head trauma that leaves her in a coma. As Sherry languishes in a hospital bed, pronounced brain-dead and about to be taken off life support, the driver that struck her faces his own life-or-death decision. Wracked with guilt, Henry wanders the city, abandoning the idea of his own wife and children, until he finds himself at the edge of a cliff. Something happens—he jumps but is held back by the hand of God or fate or some otherworldly force. He then becomes part of a legion of other ghost-like immortals (led by a man calling himself Tim) who study in the library at night, attempting a kind of penance. Meanwhile, Sherry, able to live without life support, is brought home, where now-single Karen (husband Simon left her shortly after the accident, moving in with another woman) cares for her with the help of retired nurse Ruth. Having attended Sherry for a few months, Ruth discovers that her painful arthritis has gone away. Suspecting Sherry may have healing powers, she invites her terminally ill sister over, and after a single visit, her lung cancer goes into in remission. Soon, news of Sherry’s abilities has spread across the city and beyond, with pilgrims lining up for a chance to touch the holy child. A man calling himself Father Peter (with ancient connections to Tim) threatens the Barretts, accusing them of blasphemy, and not long after, protesters are also in front of their house menacing the fractured family with taunts and random acts of violence. To Wiersema’s credit, he’s able to easily unify the family drama with the startling nature of Sherry’s powers—it is only at the end, when Father Peter and Tim (their true identities revealed) battle it out for cosmic justice, that the author threatens to tip the balance.
An engaging and unusual story—a debut with promise.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-312-36318-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
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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