Too sketchy for a portrait, too intricate for a sketch: Chambers gives us a good glimpse of the inner life of a talented...
A lugubrious coming-of-ager by critic and journalist Chambers (Having It All, 2003, etc.) about a young black girl’s lonely life with her father.
It’s 1979 and black women seem to be breaking out of jails all over New York. Eleven-year-old Angela Davis Brown has been following the case of Assata Shakur, a soldier from the Black Liberation Army who managed to escape from the upstate penitentiary where she had been sent for murdering a New Jersey State Trooper. But liberation (of a sort) strikes even closer to home when Angela wakes up one morning in Brooklyn to find that her mother Melanie has run off in the middle of the night, leaving Angela in her father Teddo’s care. A magician and small-time activist, Teddo has always doted on Angela, but he also has a casual attitude toward money that drove Melanie to despair (especially since it forced her to support the family). Now left with nothing but a picture of her mother and a comb from her hair, Angela makes the best of things with Teddo as the two move from apartment to apartment and Teddo drifts from gig to gig. A dreamer with big ideas who drives a used Mercedes and studies foreign languages in his spare time, Teddo is something of a cross between Mr. Micawber and Horatio Alger, and he’s able to inspire Angela to think of herself as a great deal more than a poor girl from the inner city. Eventually, and largely thanks to her father’s impracticalities, Angela manages to succeed in a world that she was never allowed to look upon as alien or beyond her reach.
Too sketchy for a portrait, too intricate for a sketch: Chambers gives us a good glimpse of the inner life of a talented girl making her way in the world, but she shows us too little of the world itself to make us feel the true drama of the rise.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-50900-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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