Williams’ debut novel will satisfy your craving for terrific writing and leave you hungry for more from this talented writer.
Two young women launch a supper club that lets its female-only members embrace their appetites in British writer Williams' (A Selfie as Big as the Ritz, 2017) delicious first novel.
Before Roberta meets Stevie, she is disconnected, depressed, a person to whom life mostly happens, and not always in a good way. Having left the cozy home she shared with her mother for an urban university, she is disappointed to find herself not joyously liberated, as she had imagined she would be, but emotionally confined and isolated from her peers. To kill time, satisfy a hunger for comfort, and buffer herself from academic life and social interactions, she takes up cooking, spending hours in the kitchen of her shared flat conjuring increasingly elaborate dishes and then eagerly devouring them. Roberta lives furtively, apologetically, in time moving on to a generally solitary job at a fashion website. It is there she first encounters Stevie, an aspiring artist who is as free-spirited as Roberta is inhibited, and with whom she forms an immediate bond. “I liked Stevie so much I felt embarrassed….It was like falling in love,” Roberta muses as their friendship deepens, quickly transitioning into a roommate relationship with a distinctly “matrimonial dynamic,” with Roberta delighting in cooking for someone she cares about. Not long into their head-over-heels friendship, the young women hatch an idea that combines Roberta’s knack for cooking and Stevie’s artistic sensibilities and skill for forging social connections: They will form “Supper Club,” an initiative to intermittently bring together women in a bacchanalian celebration of appetite—for food, for connection, for breaking boundaries and occupying space and approaching life on their own terms, without asking permission or offering apology. Eventually, however, in the midst of these energetic enactments of emancipation, Roberta is compelled to confront and contend with the difficulties in her past—especially those related to men who have disappointed and degraded her—and decide where, for what, and with whom she stands. Mixing together insights about food and friendship, hunger and happiness, and the space women allot themselves in the world today, Williams writes with warmth, wit, and wisdom, serving up distinctive characters and a delectably unusual story.
Williams’ debut novel will satisfy your craving for terrific writing and leave you hungry for more from this talented writer.Pub Date: July 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-53958-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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