by Diane Hammond ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 15, 2013
The controversial and topical premise will be of primary interest to hard-core orca aficionados and, no doubt, someone in...
A motley team of whale enthusiasts rescues a killer whale, or at least consigns him to a more commodious captivity.
Hammond returns to the scene of her last large-mammal cautionary tale (Hannah’s Dream, 2008), the Max L. Biedelman Zoo in fictional Bladenham, Wash. Viernes, an aging orca who was captured in the North Atlantic as a pup, is close to death in a Colombian theme park when he is rescued by Biedelman’s zookeepers, Truman and his girlfriend, Neva, with funding from Truman's aunt Ivy, an eccentric philanthropist. After transporting him to his comparatively luxurious tank at Biedelman, Viernes, renamed Friday (the English translation of his Spanish name), attracts attention from scores of whale fans and, inevitably, animal rights activists. A creature communicator, the quirkily named Libertine Adagio, is drawn to Friday’s side when she receives subliminal messages from the whale. Under Ivy’s mentorship, Libertine signs on as a volunteer caretaker for Friday, under the strict and jaded tutelage of Gabriel, a globe-trotting wildlife expert. Friday, who lived in a state of chronic malnutrition in his South American pool, is gradually regaining his health on a carefully augmented diet of raw fish. Soon, he’s beginning to thrive on the affection he gets from his trainers and audience. This book raises many issues concerning killer whales as theme park entertainers, addressing the cultural phenomena that have contributed to both orca fever and captivity controversies (see Free Willy, Shamu, etc.). However, the plot mechanics grind too slowly, clogged with colorful but rambling dialogue and too much whale maintenance how-to. The principal conflicts—romantic entanglements among Friday’s team and the ultimate dilemma of whether Friday’s ongoing captivity is really less cruel than returning him to the wild—take too long to develop. By the time a genuine crisis erupts, readers may well have given up on these appealing but phlegmatic characters.
The controversial and topical premise will be of primary interest to hard-core orca aficionados and, no doubt, someone in Hollywood.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-212421-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015
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
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SEEN & HEARD
by Margaret Atwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 17, 1985
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
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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
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edited by Margaret Atwood & Douglas Preston
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