A coming-of-age story capturing male adolescence in all its disgusting, irrational, and messy glory.
In the summer before high school, a down-on-his-luck outsider turns to the only thing he trusts: his journal.
Miles Lover—or Retard, as his “friends” have dubbed him—hates a lot of things: school, his parents, his younger twin sisters, his old house, his neighbors, bodily functions, death, and seemingly everything in between. He takes too many drugs, drinks too much, and skates too hard. The diary structure—and lack of dated entries—evokes the feeling of endless summer that Miles hates so much. The book meanders and unfolds based on whatever Miles feels compelled to divulge at the moment, the short vignettes swinging rapidly from honesty to bluster in true teenage fashion. Sometimes he writes about his recent crush or ruminates on innocuous idioms, and other times he contemplates his parents' divorce and his own mortality. Though Miles loses his temper and never seems to do anything right, Reed (Miraculous Fauna, 2016, etc.) offers empathetic glimpses into his psyche, including his incessant worrying about his mother and tenderness toward animals and nature. Reed convincingly writes a three-dimensional teenager whose self-consciousness, emotions, and hormones threaten to crush him. What Miles wants to do and what he does are constantly at odds; for a boy who always fights with his mother, he surprises himself throughout the book with his caring (“Sometimes after my mother goes to bed, I come and tuck her in for the night”). Near the end of the summer, Miles’ luck seems to change when his path crosses with that of his new elderly neighbor, Mister Reese, who his sisters believe is a murderer. The newfound friendship provides some of the most self-aware moments of his summer, which feel not only earned, but necessary.
A coming-of-age story capturing male adolescence in all its disgusting, irrational, and messy glory.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61902-537-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
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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