A face transplant transforms a burn victim into a beauty, but presents new dilemmas.
Sicily’s life is forever changed in eighth grade, when the Chicago church in which she is attending choir practice burns down in a freak fire (two Christmas trees ignite). She is luckier than many of her choirmates—she escapes with her life, dashing from a partially blocked church entrance. However, her beloved father, a firefighter, is killed in the blaze, and Sicily’s face is severely disfigured. After several corrective surgeries, she must wear a prosthetic nose and heavy greasepaint to emerge in public. Still, she manages an almost normal life. Her Aunt Marie, a glamorous newscaster, raises her after her mother’s death. She becomes a sought-after medical illustrator and is engaged to be married to her childhood friend Joey, who was at the church but who survived the fire unscathed. Her plans of adjusting to her “specialness” are rudely dashed when she learns that Joey watched his brother set the fire and that Joey has hid his complicity all these years. She seizes the opportunity to undergo a still-experimental facial transplant. A comatose teenage organ donor whose mother reluctantly takes her off life-support provides the visage, and after the intricate surgery and arduous recovery Sicily finds herself again being stared at—in admiration. Characters from other Mitchard novels, the Oprah-blessed Deep End of the Ocean (1996) and its sequel, trigger a crisis: Beth (mother of the kidnapped child in Deep) is documenting Sicily’s metamorphosis in photographs, but it is her older son Vincent, a filmmaker, who truly transforms Sicily—after their brief but tumultuous affair, she becomes pregnant. If she doesn’t terminate the pregnancy, the powerful immunosuppressants she is on may damage the fetus; if she foregoes the drugs, she may literally lose her face and possibly die from sepsis. Mitchard handles this fraught material unsensationally, adding plenty of convincing research-backed detail. Too often though, the characters’ endless moralizing douses the excitement.
Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6775-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
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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