An adroit, sharply drawn portrayal of Dickens’ indelible characters.
Intrigue and betrayal infest the shadowy underworld of Dickensian London.
The tight-fisted Ebenezer Scrooge and the ghost of Jacob Marley come vividly to life in an assured reimagining of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol by novelist Clinch (Belzoni Dreams of Egypt, 2014, etc.), who brilliantly captures the wit and irony of Dickens’ prose as he unfurls a tale of greed, cruelty, and passion. Marley and Scrooge meet when Ebenezer is enrolled at Professor Drabb’s Academy for Boys, a wretched place where boys, virtually abandoned by their families, teach and discipline one another, cook paltry meals, and cower under Drabb’s abuse. The boys, all of them, have secrets: “Secrets are their refuge and their currency and their stock in trade.” Secrets, Marley learns early, can be powerful. Although the same age as Ebenezer, he is duplicitous and wily and soon snares the newcomer into his debt. Later, Marley takes advantage of Ebenezer’s innate timidity to make him the silent, acquiescent partner in devious enterprises. Clinch’s Scrooge is not a heartless miser but rather an “automatic counting machine” who is happiest—“if he is happy anywhere”—at his desk. He “does the ciphering and is himself something of a cipher.” Marley, a chameleon, a snake, a sly money launderer, has created a panoply of “useful, flexible, and profitable” identities and set up a host of fictitious businesses that deal in liquor, cloth, furs, and “the hides of enslaved men.” Scrooge cares nothing about Marley’s importing companies, only about keeping ledgers. But the smooth surface of Scrooge’s life becomes roiled by two women close to him: his sister Fan and her friend Belle. Fan comes to hate Marley, a man, she says, who believes “the earth itself exists only to be bought and sold.” Belle, who excites in Scrooge something like love, insists that the partnership divest itself of the slaving business. Scrooge’s efforts to win Belle and thwart Marley’s unsavory enterprises lead him into “the thicket of Marley’s deceit” and, ultimately, a final confrontation between two bitter adversaries.
An adroit, sharply drawn portrayal of Dickens’ indelible characters.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2970-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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