Plot-strings unravel a bit at end, but this is better than the usual single-woman fare, and a must for nostalgic...
Thoughtful debut about a young woman coming to terms with her father’s suicide and her mother’s illness.
Unlike much of the self-consciously hip, unattached-woman-juggles-career-and-romance stories glutting the market, Gran’s first offers sly humor while incorporating some emotional heft. Twenty-nine-year-old Mary has a mildly satisfying job in New York at an on-line bookseller, a reasonably priced apartment, and a few close girlfriends. But all this moderate happiness will soon be called into question as Saturn enters her astrological house. As a birthday gift, Mary is given an in-depth reading from an Indian mystic and is told that every 29 years Saturn returns to where it began, causing upheaval and, perhaps, enlightenment. Mary could do with a little of the latter, having had enough upheaval for a lifetime. Daughter of Michael and Evelyn Forrest, literary royalty of Greenwich Village, Mary spent a charmed early childhood in the midst of writers and assorted bohemians as her parents founded the city’s foremost literary journal. The charm was broken with her father’s suicide when she was seven, driving an unspoken wedge of guilt and sorrow between Mary and Evelyn. Only now, as her mother's memory is mysteriously slipping, do the two make attempts at real friendship, Mary growing to appreciate the brilliant woman her mother is. Evelyn’s failing health isn’t the only Saturn surprise: Austin, a true love who disappeared, is now back on the scene and hopes to rekindle a relationship. Storyline aside, one of the most compelling characters here is the city itself. Woody Allen himself would be proud of the affectionate portrait made of Manhattan, the small hidden spots and treasured eateries of the past and the slightly less glorious present.
Plot-strings unravel a bit at end, but this is better than the usual single-woman fare, and a must for nostalgic Manhattanites.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2001
ISBN: 1-56947-252-1
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
