Another warmhearted contemporary romance from psychologist Mitchell, once again with an appealing, gutsy heroine and nicely...
Roxanne is community activist, star football player’s wife, devoted daughter and faithful friend—but her perfect life is about to unravel in this sequel to Nothing but the Rent (1998).
If only she could get pregnant, for starters. Jamal, her loving husband, is doing his utmost, but no luck yet. He’s eager to start a family, knowing that he’ll be playing football for just a few more years (he’s had intense headaches and his knees are pretty much shot). Roxanne, at 35, is taking thyroid supplements and praying a lot. And she counts her blessings: she has a rewarding career at the Hope Springs community center, and Jamal has provided handsomely for her and her family. She knows how much he loves her—but doesn’t know that a scheming stripper named Honey Brown is threatening a paternity suit against him, while Jamal and his best friend Linc are still trying to figure out what happened “that” night. Yes, they were both there when the stripper did a lap dance for Jamal—but only Jamal woke up with the woman, remembering nothing of the intervening hours. Afraid that Roxanne will be devastated by the news, he refuses to tell her. But she finds out eventually—after Jamal is felled by a fatal stroke during a game. Faithful friends Gayle, Monique, and Cynthia stand by her during the firestorm of speculation about drug and steroid use. Linc struggles to keep Honey Brown away from Roxanne, at least until paternity is proved or disproved—and fights his own attraction to the grieving widow as well. He sees more of her as time goes by (he also helps get her mother out of trouble with the INS), and before long, they’re in love. Then Roxanne finds that Linc has been keeping her in the dark about Honey. Can they possibly find happiness?
Another warmhearted contemporary romance from psychologist Mitchell, once again with an appealing, gutsy heroine and nicely drawn supporting characters.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-525-94621-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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