A beautifully realized work, imagistic and poetic, awash in the powers of blood and redemption.
The author of the Hilo Trilogy (Blu’s Hanging, 1997, etc.) takes a dark and surreal journey into the realm of personal anguish.
Hawaiian native Yamanaka’s narrative is bleak and wonderfully crafted from the opening passage on: “Sonny Boy, son of Sonia . . . Feel the squinting of my eyes, the gritting of my teeth, the closing of my fists. Here is my hand to cover your mouth. Here are my fists to crush your skull.” What follows are the memories of Sonia Kurisu as she overcomes her guilt for the three babies she aborted, and devotes herself against odds to the one she is now raising. Sliding randomly among past, present, dreams, and hallucinations, the story’s development is less linear than circular, beginning and ending at the same place: Sonia’s quest for atonement. Living in Las Vegas with her junkie boyfriend, Drake, and his he/she friend permanently positioned on the couch, Sonia struggles to raise Sonny Boy while finishing her art degree and working as Tiger Lily Wong in a casino lounge. Her life is a hazy wash of drugs, her toddler’s wailing, and the ghosts of the three fetuses in the past, whom she calls Number One, the Turtle, and Jar. The ghosts beckon and taunt; they want her—but for what? Interspersed between excursions into Sonia’s fantasy life are memories of her childhood, growing up poor in Hawaii with an angry mother and a father whose presence is felt only in the form of letters he sends from around the world, philosophical prose poems on the nature of existence. It is her father, Joseph, back from some exotic journey, who pulls Sonia back into the here and now by warning her that something is wrong with her child. When Sonny Boy is diagnosed as autistic, Sonia returns to Hawaii looking for a way to save him, though it soon becomes apparent that the boy she now calls Little Priest will instead save her.
A beautifully realized work, imagistic and poetic, awash in the powers of blood and redemption.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-15387-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
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
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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