A gripping thrill ride that’s also a thoughtful coming-of-age story.
Journalist Miller (Inheriting the Holy Land, 2005) makes her fiction debut with a smoldering mystery set in a New England prep school.
Iris Dupont’s parents have relocated to western Massachusetts, ostensibly so she can attend the prestigious Mariana Academy, but really because they’re worried about Iris. Her best friend Dalia recently committed suicide, and Iris has been observed talking to a wall—actually, she confides, she’s talking to her idol, Edward R. Murrow, and, yes, she knows he’s dead; but their imaginary conversations help smart, ambitious Iris sort out her feelings and remain focused on her goal of becoming a great journalist. She gets plenty to investigate, beginning with a science book containing a mysterious inscription that she finds in the bedroom of Lily Morgan, daughter of Mariana’s former headmaster. The Duponts are temporarily staying in the absent Morgans’ house, a rare contrived premise in an otherwise well-plotted tale that mingles first-person narrations by Iris and biology teacher Jonah Kaplan, who was once a student at Mariana, with the grim story of Lily’s ordeal and departure from Mariana in 2000. The novel occasionally recalls Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992), with its tale of a covert student group (Prisom’s Party in this case) up to no good, but it’s far less pretentious, and Miller’s portrait of the way basically decent kids get sucked into destructive behavior is more credible. Prisom’s Party does engage in some very ugly antics, however, and as Mariana’s scandal-racked history unfolds through Iris’ detective work, we see that Jonah was implicated in past wrongdoing as well. The author skillfully ratchets up the tension as Iris (and the reader) finds it harder and harder to tell who the good guys are, particularly after Prisom’s Party sends an appealing boy to recruit her. It’s scarily possible that she will come to share Jonah’s guilt and grief, as she is manipulated into the sort of betrayal that shattered Lily’s life.
A gripping thrill ride that’s also a thoughtful coming-of-age story.Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-547-54859-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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