A charming anti-romance. Devereaux-Nelson’s group of guys learns a touching lesson from the girls: Sometimes, all you need...
A witty and insightful debut about the support group five ex-husbands form after their marriages to one alluring, albeit troubled, lady.
Husband No. 6, Marshall, knew about Violet’s past—her five previous marriages—but like any heartsick schmuck, he thought he’d be “the one.” But he wasn’t. When Violet leaves him, he convinces himself she is returning to Costa (husband No. 2) and decides to track him down at his Greek restaurant. After drunken accusations, a little brawling and embarrassed apologies, Marshall learns that Costa is now happily married with two kids. But boy, does he know what it’s like to be dumped by Violet. To help Marshall avoid what he went through (a flirtation with alcoholism and bankruptcy) and to serve as a cautionary tale, Costa drives them to see husband No. 3. Since Violet divorced him, Brian has retreated into a world dominated by his bipolar disorder and has since created a house covered in hubcaps. Surprisingly, the three enjoy commiserating, and soon, husband No. 4, Owen, a grumpy vet, and No. 5, Tim, an IT expert, are tracked down (husband No. 1, the wealthy and older Winston, died), and the five form a kind of support group–cum–super club. The mysterious Violet is seen only through the husbands’ recollections and the notes of her current therapist, though it is clear she has serious issues and has left a wide swath of heartache in her wake. Though the men try to convince Marshall he’s better off now that Violet is gone, secretly Owen has maintained a friendship with her over the years, hoping to one day win her back. In their last conversation, Violet confesses her latest obsession to Owen—she’s going after the “one who got away,” her high school crush, Jake. The men decide they have to warn Jake, if only they can find him before Violet does.
A charming anti-romance. Devereaux-Nelson’s group of guys learns a touching lesson from the girls: Sometimes, all you need is to talk it over with friends.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59376-534-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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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