A lethal tale of an all-but-superhero whose author promises that “in this story, there are no heroes.”
A second round of action-packed, high-casualty intrigue for professional assassin Nena Knight.
Happy families may be all alike, but the family of Noble Knight, who took Nena in after her birth father was killed, is something else. Noble plays a prominent role in the African Tribal Council; Nena herself, trained as a warrior, heads a Dispatch team of professional assassins targeting anyone who threatens the Council; and Noble’s birth daughter, Elin, is pregnant with the baby of Oliver Douglas, whom Nena killed in Her Name Is Knight (2021). Now new threats seem to have reached a boiling point. Not only has someone been embezzling from the Council; rumors that someone has infiltrated its ranks and passed information to one of its many enemies are confirmed when the planned assassination of Gen. Konate goes south, leaving most of Nena’s Dispatch team dead and Nena herself grieving and struggling to figure out who she can and can’t trust. After a mission from Ghana to Gabon to strengthen a crucial alliance leads to more explosive violence, Nena thinks she’s plumbed the depths of treachery, but she’s only tasted its first fruits. Angoe, who seems to draw inspiration from a combination of Black Panther and Black Widow, keeps the betrayals coming as allies closer and closer to Nena show their true colors through their attempts to bend the Council to their own nefarious ends. Although Nena’s surprised by every single one of these betrayals, savvy readers will wise up sooner than she does.
A lethal tale of an all-but-superhero whose author promises that “in this story, there are no heroes.”Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-6625-0007-7
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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
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