A tender, wry homage to Native American wisdom and lore.
A lyrical tale of life on the Rez.
British-born Fuller (Leaving Before the Rains Come, 2015, etc.), who has written several captivating memoirs about growing up in Africa as well as a biography, of sorts, about the short life of a cowboy, makes her fiction debut with a story set on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Now living in Wyoming, Fuller visited the reservation in 2011 to witness the annual commemoration of the murder of Crazy Horse, where she felt an “unexpected homecoming.” In short chapters and spare language, Fuller spins a narrative that reads like a parable about two markedly different cousins, born within a month of each other: the contemplative Rick Overlooking Horse, “a child, and then a man, of shockingly few words”; and the volatile You Choose Watson, “half Cowboy, half Indian,” and all trouble. Severely burned by friendly fire when he was in the Army, Rick Overlooking Horse (as in a fairy tale, Fuller always refers to him by his full name) returned home and moved far out in the desert, refusing his military pension or disability allowance, which he called “the diseased currency of the White Man.” Eking out a living selling herbal medicine, he earned a reputation as a sage. When people came to him “with their wounded hearts and curdled souls,” he gently guided them “out of all the noisy unbecoming we do between birth and death.” Rick Overlooking Horse did not become the Lakota Oglala’s shaman or chief: he “simply became.” You Choose, though, boiled with anger: “it was as if everything that had happened to him—or failed to happen to him—turned toxic in his brain, flooded his veins with urgency.” Not surprisingly, he ends up in prison. Twins orphaned at birth; You Choose’s unexpected release from jail; a protest siege; and a death propel a plot that gets overly complicated at the end. But Fuller is interested less in events than kinship (“rocks are grandfathers, plants are nations”), forgiveness, and “mild spiritual epiphanies.”
A tender, wry homage to Native American wisdom and lore.Pub Date: June 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2334-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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