Heartbreaking, eerie, and acutely observant.
Teenagers spend a hazy summer at the shore. One girl comes to terms with both her emerging independence and the mysterious death of a girl just like her.
Steinberg (Spectacle, 2013) writes in small, interconnected, and poetic fragments. She follows one unnamed teenager through a summer of partying that results in the drowning death of another local girl under mysterious circumstances. This is “a story about salvation,” she says, “but that doesn’t mean this girl was saved; and it doesn’t mean that we were saved; or that anyone was, or ever would be; it only means that something, in this moment, needed saving.” Through Steinberg’s poetic prose and chapters that braid together different timelines from the same summer, we come to learn of the girl’s feelings of guilt about her friend’s death. The same summer, the girl discovers her parents’ shortcomings and begins to fight against the stereotype of the drunken party girl that she sometimes embraces. Steinberg’s observations of the delicate workings of interpersonal relationships are astute. Her protagonist says, “What I mean is, girls, there is no love the way you think of love.” Love is the mysterious promise that hangs over all the sexual encounters at the shore; adults and teens alike allow the promise of love to draw them away from sensible behavior. Through her reflections on the night of the drowning and her conversations with her family following a shocking discovery about her father, the girl is both discovering her power and the gendered expectations that cage it. She begins to find her own voice, and she questions the culture that allowed her friend to drown—even though she is a complicit participant in that culture. “And that’s what happens when you drink,” she tells us, parroting the town’s gossip. “And that’s what happens when you fool around.”
Heartbreaking, eerie, and acutely observant.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-55597-847-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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