An ungainly, overlong merger of an adventure tale and social critique.
A troubled dentist pulls up stakes and moves herself and her two children to Alaska.
Josie, like the heroes of prior Eggers novels A Hologram for the King (2012) and The Circle (2013), is an archetypal figure, representative of how modern living corrodes our psyches. Josie has split from the slacker father of her two children, Ana and Paul; she’s tormented by having encouraged a patient to sign up for the Marines who is then killed in action; and a malpractice suit effectively annihilates her practice. The only thing to be done, apparently, is to buy an RV and head from Ohio to southern Alaska, where her “stepsister who was not quite a stepsister” lives. Every romantic notion about heading for the hills is wrecked in short order: the RV is slow and hard to manage, let alone park; every beautiful vista abuts a tourist trap where staples are wildly overpriced; and Josie’s stepsister has a cultic relationship with the locals that forbids sticking around. (And that “not a quite a stepsister” situation, once it’s explained, is understandably awkward.) Between the novel's title, its episodic structure, and the scenes of rain and wildfire that shape the book’s second half, it’s clear Eggers means to craft a contemporary epic in which the bad guy is our lack of connection with nature. (Josie’s stepsister lives in Homer.) Josie herself is an intermittently poignant and affecting figure, prone to comic musings about writing a musical about her hapless experiences or dourly fixating on a daymare of a bottle breaking across her face. But those details can’t compensate for the overall baggy and rambling nature of the story, which doesn’t meaningfully develop Josie’s character and mainly reduces her children into plot complications. “We are not civilized people,” Josie muses. But this novel is an unpersuasive glimpse into our nascent ferality.
An ungainly, overlong merger of an adventure tale and social critique.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49380-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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