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EVERY BITTER THING SWEET

Too neatly affirming, but the details of life and landscape are fair compensation.

Second novel from the Trinidadian journalist (A Thirst For Rain, 1999, not reviewed), a richly textured love story with a gritty setting—a gambling den/bordello—about a bargirl and a would-be boxing champ wising up to life and love.

Young Odile dreamed of becoming a doctor but fell pregnant at 17. In a fight with neighbor Rory, a young man whose father Saul becomes abusive when drunk, she lost the baby. Now, four years later, she works in a seedy bar owned by Miss Ling, an old Chinese woman, and sleeps with Vincent, Miss Ling’s grandson. The bar is also a bordello, but Odile refuses to have sex with her customers. Meanwhile, Rory is training to be a boxer but also works for a pharmaceutical company, a job that brings him into contact with bored drugstore-owner Zenobia, who insists they make love when Rory comes by on business. Rory feels guilty about hurting Odile, whom he’s loved from boyhood; Odile, in turn, has long forgiven him—the fight was an aberrant moment provoked by her own self-disgust—but still feels guilty for the relief she felt when she miscarried. In fact, she became a bargirl because it’s what she felt she deserved. As Vincent tries to persuade Miss Ling to modernize the premises, Rory confronts Saul about his drinking and thievery; Odile realizes she doesn’t love Vincent after all, and Rory and she begin seeing each other again, first by accident then by design. An old friend, helps Rory face his fears of becoming murderously angry when provoked—outside as well as inside the ring; and Odile does some heartsearching of her own. But it takes a fire, started by Vincent, and a false arrest before the two really start talking.

Too neatly affirming, but the details of life and landscape are fair compensation.

Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2001

ISBN: 1-57566-851-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Dafina/Kensington

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001

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THE HANDMAID'S TALE

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

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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

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THE WOMAN IN CABIN 10

Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.

Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.

Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.

Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.

Pub Date: July 19, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016

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