An appealing and original story that gets bogged down in its own originality: it would have worked better had the author...
Canadian Kowalski’s third outing, a follow-up to his debut (Eddie’s Bastard, 1999), offers an engaging, offbeat account of an All-American girl coming of age in a very strange town.
A backwoods village on Lake Erie, Mannville, New York, is the home of 17-year-old Haley Bombauer, who prefers to be called “Flash Jackson.” An inveterate tomboy (“a stuntman trapped in a female body”), Haley is laid up for the summer with a broken leg, sustained when she fell through the roof of her mother’s barn. Her grandmother, a strict Mennonite, lives as a semi-recluse in a cabin in the woods, and Haley is sent to stay with her for part of her recuperation. Grandma had always seemed a bit odd, but Haley soon finds out that she hasn’t guessed the half of it: not only is Grandma a witch, but she’s nearly four hundred years old! And the stream that runs alongside her cabin is the runoff of a sacred well. Has Haley gone off her rocker? Even if so, she won’t want for company. Her mother has a sixth sense that allows her to see into the future (as does Haley). Her neighbor Elizabeth Powell is a genteel ex-CIA agent who carries a Luger and speaks in a secret language (“Zammish”) to her friend Letty Horgan (who may also be a witch). There are other typical small-town types in Mannville (village idiot Frankie Grunveldt; Haley’s hunky sweetheart, Adam Schumacher), but they fade toward the background once Haley gets initiated into the craft and sets herself up as an occult healer. Eventually, she comes to see that the real world and the hidden one can coexist peacefully, and she settles down to a happy albeit somewhat odd domesticity with the birth of her son—who certainly has an interesting life ahead of him.
An appealing and original story that gets bogged down in its own originality: it would have worked better had the author pulled out fewer stops.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-621136-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
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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