A well-written tale of adventure and drama about a woman struggling to save herself.
Medlock’s whimsical debut novel tells a story of a woman with an unusual and dangerous talent.
Rebecca Katz is no ordinary heroine. Poised, confident and controlled, she’s an expert art authenticator who’s known for precision and professionalism. But her secret ability remains secret: the power to communicate with objects. This is particularly useful in her line of work, in which potentially valuable ancient artifacts show up on her desk regularly, but also in her personal life, as when a pendant around her neck warns her away from danger. Rebecca’s success is set to skyrocket when a first-century dagger finds its way into her capable hands—but this dagger isn’t like other objects. From the moment she begins talking to it, in an effort to find out more about its past, it starts telling her a series of lies. Rebecca soon learns that the object has a corrupt, twisted nature and is bent on destroying her career. Soon, she finds herself trapped in a despairing quandary—objects, which she’d always trusted, are now proving false, and people, whom she’s always avoided, are all she can rely on. As malevolent thugs hound Rebecca and pursue the dagger, she escapes New York for Miami, where she hopes to find safety and perhaps love, as two different men try to tempt her away from her life of solitude. This suspenseful novel tells the tale of Rebecca’s physical and emotional journey in a unique, often captivating manner. Her story quickly transcends the conventions of a mere mystery novel to become a story full of depth and meaning, as her unusual gift comes to symbolize an approach to life that she must leave behind. Her growth as a character plays against the intriguing backdrop of the antiques world, and the story delves into details of psychology, history and art along the way.
A well-written tale of adventure and drama about a woman struggling to save herself.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482008319
Page Count: 378
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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