This follow-the-plot-dots modernization unfortunately falls flat due to Chevalier’s heavy-handedness in turning Othello into...
As her contribution to the Hogarth Shakespeare series of contemporary retellings of the Bard’s works, Chevalier (At the Edge of the Orchard, 2016, etc.) turns Othello into the story of a disastrous chain of events that follows a black student’s arrival at a white elementary school in suburban Washington, D.C.
Knowing Othello is a tragedy, readers begin the novel with dread, aware that at least one of the sixth-grade protagonists gathering before classes begin will likely meet a tragic end. Among the girls, Dee is smart and popular, Mimi intuitive and thoughtful, Blanca what used to be called “fast.” Blanca’s boyfriend, Casper, is the most popular boy, but “calculating” Ian runs the playground. The children are shocked by the arrival of Osei, a Ghanaian diplomat’s son and the first black child the all-white school has seen. Despite references to Soul Train and bell bottoms, the school’s straight-laced, narrow-minded atmosphere feels more 1950s than post–Civil Rights–era 1970s. Dee and Casper are the two exceptions. Casper offers friendship while the romantic attraction between Dee and Osei is immediately palpable—and goes over the top into ick-factor territory when Dee looks at Osei and “the fire leapt and spread through him.” Meanwhile, Ian senses Osei will challenge his sway over his classmates, especially after Osei shows prowess during a kickball game. Lacking Osei’s confusing charm, Ian comes across as a bully who controls through fear. He manipulates the other kids to create emotional mayhem that closely follows the original play’s outline. The book’s five divisions equate to the play’s five acts, and the novel’s primary pleasure lies in how Chevalier parallels Shakespeare’s plot details—for instance, transforming Othello’s handkerchief embroidered with strawberries into Osei’s strawberry-embossed pencil box and having the kids play on a playground pirate ship.
This follow-the-plot-dots modernization unfortunately falls flat due to Chevalier’s heavy-handedness in turning Othello into a polemic on the evils of American racism and her awkward shoehorning of tween angst into Shakespearian tragedy.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44763-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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
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