Eloquent prose, rich characterizations, and knotty concepts—an emotional and intellectual tour de force.
In this gripping novel with elements of a fairy tale, Chidgey examines the lives of parentless children in an alternative Britain that feels frighteningly plausible.
Imagine World War II ended in a treaty without winners or losers after Hitler’s assassination by German conspirators in 1943; since then, British scientists have had access to studies “of immense scientific value” made in “the camps,” as they are called with pointed vagueness. In 1979, this history is taught to 13-year-old triplet brothers—mercurial William, softhearted Lawrence, and thoughtful, watchful Vincent, who narrates most of the book. They live in a group home for boys, part of the Sycamore Homes program established by the government in 1944 to raise parentless children. Doted on by a threesome of Morning, Afternoon, and Night mothers, taught from the encyclopedic Book of Knowledge (an actual publication) and in weekly ethics discussions, the Sycamore boys have had happy if isolated childhoods marred only by incessant sickliness. Those who recuperate from “the Bug” get to move to “the Big House in Margate,” which, according to the brochure, is a wonderful place next to an amusement park. Only the triplets still remain when a new Conservative government decides to discontinue the Sycamore program to cut costs. Soon the Prime Minister puts the well-meaning but clueless Minister of Loneliness in charge of rehoming the triplets. But where? That these children have been part of a creepy scientific experiment is obvious early on, but one shocking, horrifying surprise follows another in what is, at its most basic, a cat-and-mouse thriller. Meanwhile, Chidgey forces readers to delve into moral questions concerning science (and by extension, technology), pragmatism, personal responsibility, and institutional evil. Then there’s the novel’s unavoidable, disquieting contemplation of just who is given equal right in any given society (including ours). Chidgey, a New Zealander, borrows elements from Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, but the character Vincent most resembles is Pinocchio. Broad themes and issues become deeply personal as his coming-of-age becomes a monumental struggle toward self-discovery.
Eloquent prose, rich characterizations, and knotty concepts—an emotional and intellectual tour de force.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781538774076
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Cardinal
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: today
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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