While a solidly constructed book, certain headlines deserve respect and distance, and some may consider Littleton’s account...
Littlefield (Garden of Stones, 2013, etc.) draws facts from a true crime to create a novel about vicious intruders who invade an upper-class family’s home in Calumet, Minn.
Jen and Ted Glass appear to have the perfect life: They live in a big house in a nice neighborhood where Jen volunteers at her children’s schools, attends Zumba classes and occasionally has a girls’ night out with her friends. But Ted was laid off from his job as a global management executive six months ago, and he’s yet to find a new position. Jen’s tried to be patient, but she’s become suspicious of Ted’s frequent absences and lack of results, and they often find themselves arguing. Adding to the tension is the sullen behavior of 15-year-old Livvy, who’s involved in an ongoing rivalry with her ex-boyfriend’s new love interest, and 4-year-old son Teddy’s selective mutism. When two intruders invade their home, lock the family in the basement, ransack their house and force Jen to go to the bank the next day to empty their accounts, Jen and Ted assume the men will take the loot and the family’s valuables and leave. However, the criminals remain in their home while Jen is forced to access other investments. When the older thug, Dan, drops nuggets of information about the family that only an insider would know, Jen (who’s also having disturbing dreams) suspects their captivity is more than just a random occurrence. Dan’s partner, Ryan, worries the couple even more with his instability and increasing interest in Livvy, who defies the brutes. Knowing he must take a stand, Ted takes heroic actions to save his family. Littleton pens a mechanically sound narrative by altering the family structure and adding her own twists to elements of the source material. But readers who recall the brutal attack suffered by a Connecticut family in 2007—and who empathize with family members and the lone survivor who must cope with very genuine memories every single day—may find it difficult to cast aside the true story and embrace the author’s fictionalized version.
While a solidly constructed book, certain headlines deserve respect and distance, and some may consider Littleton’s account exploitative.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7783-1478-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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