Amid the changing allegiances and alliances, sex eventually has consequences, though the reader wearied by two years of this...
Soap opera, satire, and religious allegory find an uneasy balance within this earthbound version of a space colony.
There’s a lot of back story in the latest from the prolific, eclectic Boyle (The Harder They Come, 2015, etc.). As a scientific experiment in the “ecology of closed systems,” with lessons learned for when “we’d have to seed life elsewhere—on Mars, to begin with,” four men and four women are chosen by Mission Control (from 16 finalists) to live in a sealed compound in the Arizona desert for two years. They are designated “Mission Two” after an unfortunate accident aborted “Mission One.” Ultimately, the grand design calls for 50 such two-year missions, a full century of data collection. Three different first-person narrators provide alternating perspectives in separate chapters that advance the plot. Dawn and Ramsay have both been chosen, like the rest, because of media attractiveness to bring public support to an enterprise that relies on it, while Linda, a Korean-American also-ran who remains behind as a monitor on those under glass, feels like her looks and ethnicity have unfairly deprived her. Ramsay maintains that “there are winners and losers in life” and that Linda “was one of the losers.” Dawn and Linda have bonded throughout the training and selection process, but Linda now finds herself transitioning “from best friend to frenemy.” Though the plot also involves a God and a Judas in Mission Control, and eventually an Eve as well, the focus throughout these 500-plus pages rarely shifts from its central obsession: who among “what our species has come to consider prime breeding stock” will pair with whom? Those on the inside gossip and speculate, as does Mission Control, as does the public at large. “Since we were all unmarried, there was endless speculation in the press about which of us might pair up, one rag even going so far as to post odds,” writes Dawn.
Amid the changing allegiances and alliances, sex eventually has consequences, though the reader wearied by two years of this might not much care.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234940-8
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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