A beautifully written tale about Australian dreamers that pointedly captures them at a crucial time.
An Australian agriculture student forms a tightknit bond with creative friends and lovers who are planning for their futures in this literary novel.
Dara Mahoney is living with seven other students in Brisbane in 1961 in an old rooming house. They are agriculture students, but their hopes and dreams veer far from the secure futures their degrees promise. Dara carries a torch for Joe Gordon, who yearns to play the violin in Europe. Bill Hereward wishes to motorbike to India, and Cass Clayton wants to sing. The guys stay up late drinking and planning an ocean voyage on a catamaran. They all feel pressure to get married young but fear that a wedding may signal the end of their aspirations. Against the backdrop of the White Australia Policy, Cass is in a relationship with Ling Chang, an Indonesian facing deportation. Doug Jarratt wants to marry Tripta Srivastava, a beautiful Indian doctor and dancer, but she’s thinking of the fallout from her family back home. Dara is defiant about marriage, in part because she had parents who fought (“She hadn’t lived with two mad people for nine years without learning the rudiments of good drama”). Joe pairs off with Klari Nadassy, an immigrant who fled war-torn Hungary, losing her ballet career and becoming a teacher. As tragedy strikes the group, Dara must decide if following her heart means she has to give up her dreams. De Valera’s powerful coming-of-age tale doesn’t shy away from tackling difficult subjects. The strongly drawn characters are young, bright, and artistic, and the author is keenly aware of the emotional states of those raised during World War II (“Sixteen years had passed since the end of World War II, but Dara and her crowd remembered it well: the threat of a Japanese invasion had hung over all their childhoods. From February 1942 onwards, searchlights raked the night skies”). The Brisbane “Mates” aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty working in the fields or to confront any serious problem head-on. Cass, in particular, deals with horrifying acts of misogyny while Doug tackles Aboriginal rights. There is a multitude of issues raised in this story, but de Valera has woven everything together with vivid, dynamic prose.
A beautifully written tale about Australian dreamers that pointedly captures them at a crucial time.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-9942745-6-4
Page Count: 390
Publisher: Old Tiger Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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