The charm and innocence of the storytelling from Gabriel’s point of view make a substantial contribution to a moving,...
A delicate, spot-on evocation of childhood amid turmoil and tragedy, Troyan’s fine debut features a spunky ten-year-old forced to grow up before her time.
Gabriel is no more wicked or curious than any other girl her age, but circumstances do conspire to make her somewhat fierce. On her family’s usual summer holiday in the French countryside, the first hint of impending disaster comes when she learns that the house’s caretaker has died since the previous visit. Making themselves comfortable anyway, Gabriel, her nearly deaf younger sister Alex, their beautiful mother, their grandmother and her sister from South Africa, and their moody nanny all await the arrival of their American father. When he does arrive it’s just for a short visit, long enough to drop a bombshell: he’s fallen for another woman. This news sends Gabriel’s already flighty mother into a state somewhere between a funk and a frenzy, in which she has little time for either of her children. Granny fills in as best she can, which is fine with Gabriel, who adores her. But when Granny falls and sprains an ankle, the doctor next door (actually a psychiatrist but willing to make a house call when he finds Gabriel’s mother fetchingly at his door) enters their lives and takes her away from her kids even more. The nanny, meanwhile, has a thing going with the Spanish chauffeur, and when it doesn’t go smoothly she hits the gin hard. All of this Gabriel and little Alex might have been able to bear, given time and affection, but when Granny suddenly dies late one afternoon, after climbing with Gabriel to their favorite spot on the hill above the house, there’s no one to take her place, and, ready or not, the girls are left to find their own way to a better place.
The charm and innocence of the storytelling from Gabriel’s point of view make a substantial contribution to a moving, beautifully crafted novel.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-57962-083-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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
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