De Moor's book fails to provide easy answers or pat conclusions, but of course life is like that, too. Like the widow, we...
During a bout of insomnia, a young widow ruminates on her husband’s suicide. While a Bundt cake bakes in the oven and the house is silent, she scrutinizes the past for telling details, the moment on which everything hangs.
Compact, haunting, and lovely, the story takes place over the course of one long night interspersed with flashbacks to the unnamed narrator’s young adulthood. She recalls meeting her husband, Ton, as college students in the late 1960s and their fall through winter ice while skating on frozen canals. We learn of their brief marriage, as they establish themselves as a couple on Ton’s inherited family farm. Dutch author de Moor (The Kreutzer Sonata, 2014, etc.) was a classical singer and pianist before becoming a writer, and even in translation, her prose retains a balanced, musical quality. Descriptions of places and people are evocative, but de Moor also renders more abstract concepts—such as what it’s like to be alone and wide awake in the middle of the night—with razor-sharp specificity: “The fever of sleeplessness drives people to do the strangest things. They whisper poems that appear in mirror-writing behind their eyes, weigh grains of rice on imaginary scales, picture themselves lying on a bed of red velvet.” Despite the novel’s short length, it is unhurried and assured; no word is wasted even as de Moor spends paragraphs recounting often slow and mundane processes, like mixing eggs and milk and yeast to make dough. Yet there is vitality in the chores, too, as when the dough is later kneaded, when the widow begins “slamming my fists into the pale, pliant lump in front of me.” In both its rich and unapologetic descriptions of domesticity and frank attitude toward sex (as the widow’s cake bakes, her latest lover lies asleep upstairs), the book is a treatise on one individual’s womanhood.
De Moor's book fails to provide easy answers or pat conclusions, but of course life is like that, too. Like the widow, we must all learn to tolerate that which is ambiguous, unexplained, incomplete.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-939931-69-6
Page Count: 122
Publisher: New Vessel Press
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
A thoughtful and pensive tale with intelligent characters and a satisfying romance.
A promise to his best friend leads an Army serviceman to a family in need and a chance at true love in this novel.
Beckett Gentry is surprised when his Army buddy Ryan MacKenzie gives him a letter from Ryan’s sister, Ella. Abandoned by his mother, Beckett grew up in a series of foster homes. He is wary of attachments until he reads Ella’s letter. A single mother, Ella lives with her twins, Maisie and Colt, at Solitude, the resort she operates in Telluride, Colorado. They begin a correspondence, although Beckett can only identify himself by his call sign, Chaos. After Ryan’s death during a mission, Beckett travels to Telluride as his friend had requested. He bonds with the twins while falling deeply in love with Ella. Reluctant to reveal details of Ryan’s death and risk causing her pain, Beckett declines to disclose to Ella that he is Chaos. Maisie needs treatment for neuroblastoma, and Beckett formally adopts the twins as a sign of his commitment to support Ella and her children. He and Ella pursue a romance, but when an insurance investigator questions the adoption, Beckett is faced with revealing the truth about the letters and Ryan’s death, risking losing the family he loves. Yarros’ (Wilder, 2016, etc.) novel is a deeply felt and emotionally nuanced contemporary romance bolstered by well-drawn characters and strong, confident storytelling. Beckett and Ella are sympathetic protagonists whose past experiences leave them cautious when it comes to love. Beckett never knew the security of a stable home life. Ella impulsively married her high school boyfriend, but the marriage ended when he discovered she was pregnant. The author is especially adept at developing the characters through subtle but significant details, like Beckett’s aversion to swearing. Beckett and Ella’s romance unfolds slowly in chapters that alternate between their first-person viewpoints. The letters they exchanged are pivotal to their connection, and almost every chapter opens with one. Yarros’ writing is crisp and sharp, with passages that are poetic without being florid. For example, in a letter to Beckett, Ella writes of motherhood: “But I’m not the center of their universe. I’m more like their gravity.” While the love story is the book’s focus, the subplot involving Maisie’s illness is equally well-developed, and the link between Beckett and the twins is heartfelt and sincere.
A thoughtful and pensive tale with intelligent characters and a satisfying romance.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64063-533-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Entangled: Amara
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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