Jio sprinkles her book with sunny messages about being the author of your own life; fans will applaud her optimistic outlook.
A woman struggling with her past discovers a family connection to a classic children's book.
June Andersen’s tough, no-nonsense approach has been key to her success working for a major New York City bank. It’s also resulted in high blood pressure and stress. When she finds out that her great-aunt Ruby has died and designated her the beneficiary of her estate, June returns to her childhood home in Seattle, Wash., intending to sell the children’s bookstore she’s inherited. Instead, she reconnects with her past, falls in love and decides to stay. Sorting through her aunt’s possessions, June follows a trail of old letters between Ruby and her literary friend, well-known children’s author Margaret Wise Brown. That trail leads to several discoveries: Ruby once had a married lover whose prominent family still resides in Seattle; both friends had troubled relationships with their sisters; and Brown not only visited Bluebird Bookstore, but June’s great-aunt inspired one of Brown’s most popular works, Goodnight Moon. When June receives notice the shop is within days of foreclosure, she sells her possessions and stages a fundraiser to keep Ruby’s beloved bookstore open. Thanks to the shop’s historic association with Brown and its hallowed status among the readers of Seattle, everyone from celebrities to a major news organization lends a hand. In the process, June learns an important lesson about acceptance and forgiveness, finds the answer to her aunt’s greatest secret and receives a helping hand from a surprising source. Readers unfamiliar with Brown’s works may not relate to Jio’s (Morning Glory, 2013, etc.) many references to book titles, bunnies and the "great green room," but the novel provides an adequate diversion for those who enjoy light romance and mystery.
Jio sprinkles her book with sunny messages about being the author of your own life; fans will applaud her optimistic outlook.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-14-218021-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
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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