Enduring love and the endless cycle of death and rebirth.
This mystical, contemporary, Alaskan adventure tale follows the love between a young environmentalist and her laconic Ennuit husband, with a supporting cast that includes a gun-happy, spurned ex-lover; a wise old “wolf shaman;” a feral child; a trusty sidekick (named Rusty, of course); and wolves. Lots of wolves.
When Kale meets Elliot at The Crusty Miner–the local bar and pool hall in Midland, Alaska–it’s love at first sight. Well, at least heavy attraction, since both of them have clearly been around the block a few times. After meeting again at the town’s hoot-n-holler Gold Days founders celebration, the unlikely couple–she a California-bred white girl drawn to the cold North country for personal and professional reasons, he a commercial pilot of native ancestry–get married and seem set to live happily ever after, despite their cultural differences. But while on an emergency flight to the village where Elliot’s family lives, an accident leaves him dead and Kale–pregnant and scared–lost and alone in the snowy wilderness. With the help of an entity she names Gray Wolf, she eventually finds her way back to civilization. Years pass, and though her preternaturally wise son Matthew yearns to explore his own Ennuit heritage, he is rejected by the tribe. When tragedy strikes again, Kale finds the inner strength to do what she knows to be right by seeking the spiritual guidance of the wolves she loves and protects. Again the ancient wisdom leads her to the right path, difficult as it may be. The action-packed plot often veers dangerously close to pure tabloid melodrama in this bracing, though meditative novel. Still, MacAfee’s controlled poetic tone and obviously deep sympathy for environmentalism and respect for native customs mostly keep the potential cringe-factor at bay. While less metaphysically inclined readers might find Frozen Tears’ transformative spiritual aspects a trifle off-putting, sentimental animal lovers with a fancy for rugged terrain and high tragedy will find much to relish.
Enduring love and the endless cycle of death and rebirth.Pub Date: May 8, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4392-1819-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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