Thoughtful and lively story from a husband-wife team who blend two distinctive voices into a seamless, satisfying whole.
Another contemporary romance from the authors of Love Don’t Live Here Anymore (2002), etc.
Kenneth Roman doesn’t know quite what to say to a beautiful single mother who doesn’t want to listen. As a teacher and coach at a Teaneck high school, he’s seen a lot of kids get into serious trouble, and Zaria Chance’s son James may be headed in the wrong direction. He’s only trying to do the right thing by telling her about James’s difficulties—but, damn, talk about ingratitude. As far as Zaria can see, Mr. Roman has her pegged as a welfare queen from the ’hood, even though Zaria’s been raising her James and Jasmine alone ever since their no-account daddy disappeared, and she just so happens to make $60,000 a year as a university financial officer. If he doesn’t believe her, he can go and ask Principal Bell, a strong black woman herself, who won’t take kindly to any man questioning a black woman’s mothering. Sure, the principal’s seen plenty of triflin’ heffas who never should’ve had kids come and go, but Zaria isn’t one of them. Kenneth has to agree, to his chagrin, as he finds out more about Zaria and her family. Maybe his guilty secret is getting in the way of his better judgment: his own daughter Lane doesn’t live with him, and he’s not as a good a father to her as he wants to be. There aren’t enough hours in a day to do his job, get some exercise, keep up with family and friends, and maintain a social life—though there’s no one special in his life right now, besides Antoinette, who likes to show up every so often in nothing but a gold lamé raincoat. Zaria doesn’t have a man and doesn’t want one—but Kenneth Roman keeps coming around and she’s beginning to like him . . . .
Thoughtful and lively story from a husband-wife team who blend two distinctive voices into a seamless, satisfying whole.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2003
ISBN: 0-525-94709-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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