A ruefully witty love story, more for dames than babes.
Chick-lit grows older and wiser.
Food writer Boorstin, author of Let Us Eat Cake (reviewed in the February 1, 2002, issue of Kirkus Reviews) serves up a concoction, more dessert than entrée, that exuberantly mixes the sweet things in life–love, friendship, family, and plenty of spice. Forty-nine year old narrator Miriam Levy is an L.A. wife, mother, and “with” cookbook author (“someone who enables the author to get the ‘By’ credit”). Her friend Kate, also 49, is divorced, rich, and unsettled. Eric, Kate’s first love, was the Swiss guide on the girls’ college trip to Europe in the ’70s. Of course, Kate, itching for adventure–i.e., a love affair for old times’ sake–Googles Eric, with resounding success: Naturally, he’s now the Swiss Ambassador to Malaysia, and–jackpot!–he’s never forgotten her. Steamy e-mails ensue, itchy condition worsens, and Kate’s off to Kuala Lumpur, attempting to drag along the always cautious, very reluctant Miriam, as support and partner-in-midlife-antics. Miriam remains stalwart in her refusal until her eldest daughter, a TV reporter, announces she’s pregnant and expects Miriam to raise the baby; Miriam’s aging mother, who lives in Buffalo, wants to move in; and failed screenwriter husband Alan continues to ignore her. Miriam’s soon on the plane. In Malaysia, attempted assault, a kidnapping, and other zany adventures the two women face hit the picaresque high marks, avoiding, in true chick-lit fashion, somber reminders of life’s real dangers. Kate finally hooks up with Eric, as his suspicious, pesky, dumpy wife mills about. And Miriam is wooed by Vijay, a rich Indian doctor she met on the plane. A widower, Vijay proposes marriage to a very tempted Miriam. (Alan, remember, isn’t the fun fellow he used to be.) The twists, turns, and revelations of life and love pile wisdom on top of wisdom and leave Kate and Miriam waxing wistful. Though “inspired by a true incident . . . involving Boorstin and one of her best friends,” this is an adult fairy tale (albeit with very real recipes). Happy endings may just be in the works.
A ruefully witty love story, more for dames than babes.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-58348-233-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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