Dull romance. The most interesting character is the husband no one (except his daughter) likes.
In Gertler’s conventional second (Jimmy’s Girl, 2001), an unhappily married woman inherits a lake cabin that unlocks secrets from the past and opens her to true love.
Grace and her younger sister Melanie were raised almost entirely by a housekeeper who lavished affection upon them—fortunately, since their parents were distant and withdrawn. Now married to an unloving cardiologist in Manhattan and the mother of a perfect teenaged daughter, Grace is shocked when her aged parents commit joint suicide and even more shocked to learn she has inherited a house on an island in upstate New York she never knew existed. Since her husband, selfishly, has gone off to Aspen for a vacation with their daughter, Grace travels alone to Diamond Lake in the dead of winter. Almost immediately she meets Luke, a local guide, and is strongly drawn to him. Soon after, sister Melanie comes to keep Grace company, and Luke takes them across the frozen lake to the island house where he reveals the shocking secret most readers will already have guessed: Grace had an older brother who drowned in the lake when he was nine and Grace three. Her previously lively, warm parents were devastated and never recovered. Further, Grace’s brother had been Luke’s best friend, and Luke has mourned his loss for 40 years. Little wonder he and Grace feel a mutual attraction. But Grace must return to her family—and before she can resolve her feelings for Luke, her husband has the gall to suffer a heart attack. She feels obligated to nurse him back to health, but his illness only points up the emptiness of the marriage. While their daughter is in Europe for the summer, Grace heads back to Luke and Diamond Lake, her husband to his boob-jobbed girlfriend in Aspen. Soon everyone is living happily ever after.
Dull romance. The most interesting character is the husband no one (except his daughter) likes.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-525-94639-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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