Oddball romance rich in local color.
Loners seeking solitude in the Alaskan wilderness find love, and a kind of family.
In this colorful debut, Foreman introduces a cast of ornery misfits, each of whom has his or her own reasons for ending up in bleak Toehold, Ala. Lovely Mary Ellen, aka Mel, has been on the run since she was a teenager, fleeing a hateful mother who did her best to sever Mel’s only loving family ties. Cody adored his own mother, a flower child from the Haight, but he’s discovered he can’t be at home anywhere near other people. He prefers the silence of the wilderness or even of the carcasses he expertly mounts as taxidermy. Throw in a few other outsiders, such as Buddy, a former marine who abandoned civilization when his wife took off, vowing to “take his pension and move as far away as he could get and still be in the United States.” Add Native Americans, such as Summer Joe, back from a jail stint for bigamy, and the oversized bartender Sweet-ass Sue, and the small settlement of Toehold is complete. But, like a darker version of Northern Exposure, love blossoms even among these gruff types. The catalyst comes slowly and rather late in this novel, through one of Mel’s typical harebrained schemes. She advertises her rented trailer as the “Golden Bear Lodge” and herself as a hunter. She has, in fact, seen a magnificent golden-furred grizzly and dreams about making him her prize. But when an obnoxious Los Angeles film producer answers her ad, he sees only a scruffy town and a pretty chick. Although the producer remains an annoying stereotype, by the time this delayed action kicks in, Foreman has fleshed out his oddball cast. The ensuing developments basically concern Cody and Mel, but in Foreman’s assured prose the others’ stories come to life as well, for a denouement that flows as smoothly as the river.
Oddball romance rich in local color.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4331-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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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