There are books about murder and there are books about imploding families; this is the rare novel that seamlessly weaves the...
A fictional reimagining of real-life murders so infamous they earned its alleged perpetrator her own playground rhyme and ax-wielders everywhere a catchy chopping song, even if the killer’s guilt was never firmly established.
On Aug. 4, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts, Andrew Borden and his second wife, Abby, were found butchered in their home, the weapon thought to be an ax, though police never found it. In a dazzling debut novel that is as unsettling as the summer heat that permeates the crime scene, Schmidt alternates the first-person narration among sisters Lizzie and Emma Borden; Bridget, the family's maid; and a mysterious man named Benjamin, whose role doesn't come into focus so much as congeal like drying blood. Tempestuous Lizzie still lives at home with her father and stepmother, whom she calls “Mrs. Borden”; their relationship is strained at best. Older sister Emma, much to Lizzie’s dismay, has left Fall River to stay with a friend for a while; the symbiotic relationship between the sisters and their teetering feelings of intense love and loathing fuel much of the novel’s emotional fire. Bridget, who sees everything and is seething that Mrs. Borden recently confiscated her savings, is eager to get out of the house—and Schmidt creates such a palpable sense of unease that the reader is, too. Benjamin, a passing acquaintance of the girls’ uncle, burns with rage; Schmidt is careful not to lay blame for the murders directly at his feet, though his presence is vital. It’s a gamble to focus almost entirely on the day leading up to the murders and the actual day of the crime rather than widening the scope to include Lizzie’s well-known trial and eventual acquittal, but it's one that pays off for Schmidt, creating an unusually intimate portrait.
There are books about murder and there are books about imploding families; this is the rare novel that seamlessly weaves the two together, asking as many questions as it answers.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2659-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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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