This exuberant fantasy is finely crafted, filled with humor and very moving.
A daughter caring for her terminally ill mother must find her way out of an unusual desert town in Durst’s debut novel for adults.
Lauren Chase is resigned to a boring office job while she supports her mother, who is recovering from cancer, after abandoning her dreams of becoming an artist. When her mother relapses, Lauren hits the road to avoid hearing the prognosis. The suspense builds as she loses her wireless signal and is stranded in the aptly named town of Lost: a purgatory for lost souls, some living and some dead, who scavenge through a humorous catalog of lost items—ranging from mismatched socks to wasted water—to find the missing item they need to move on. Similar to the Nothing that destroys Fantasiana in Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story, the post-apocalyptic wasteland of Lost is surrounded by a roving dust storm that consumes anyone who dares enter it with the wrong attitude. After she's plucked from the dust by the Finder—a tattooed, supernatural being named Peter whom she develops a crush on—Lauren learns that the only way to return to the real world is to talk to a mysterious figure called the Missing Man. Unfortunately, the Missing Man takes one look at Lauren and runs away, forcing her into hiding—along with Peter and an abandoned child named Claire—with an angry mob in close pursuit. Her subsequent attempts to repel the villagers with booby traps bring levity to a grim situation. While she scavenges for clothing and food, Lauren rediscovers her forgotten interests, like her love for art and for the ocean, as she finds the courage to face her mother’s impending death. Adding to the tension is the fact that Peter doesn’t want Lauren to leave, and the longer she stays in town, the more attached she is to her new friends. Readers may be similarly torn between an appropriate ending for Lauren (returning home to deal with her mother) and the alternative (staying in Lost with Peter and Claire). Fortunately, the author will continue to explore the world of Lost in a sequel.
This exuberant fantasy is finely crafted, filled with humor and very moving.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7783-1711-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
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
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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