A beautiful and gut-wrenching exploration of a woman defining herself after a monumental loss.
A young woman moves to the Brighton seaside to cope with her boyfriend's death in Perry’s debut novel.
Holly is a 20-something musician reeling from the sudden death of her longtime boyfriend, Sam. Unable to stay in London, surrounded by the remnants of happy memories, she abruptly packs up and moves to Brighton, where she proceeds to spend a lot of time staring at the sea. While doing so she meets Frank, a retired magician with a habit of collecting broken people and who has dealt with a loss himself. Joining Frank at his next book club meeting, Holly is introduced to a new social circle filled with people who either understand her pain or empathize with it as they deal with their own issues, from loss of a child to eating disorders. As she grows closer to her new group of friends, she finds the space to begin to deal with her feelings about losing Sam and explore the possibilities of her new life in Brighton. Perry’s last book was a poetry collection (Curious Hands: 24 Hours in Soho, 2015), which comes as no surprise, as the novel is told in a lyrical first-person that wrenches deep within Holly to connect with the reader. Short vignettes jump around from the present to memories of times past as Holly gets herself through, one day at a time. Though there is some discussion of the other characters’ difficulties (racism, body image issues, homophobia), ultimately this is Holly’s story, told from Holly’s point of view, so they are only briefly touched upon. At only a little more than 200 pages, this is a quick read but by no means a light one, each sentence carefully crafted and full of emotion.
A beautiful and gut-wrenching exploration of a woman defining herself after a monumental loss.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61219-726-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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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