A parable for the social media age that critiques without resorting to alarmism or preachiness.
Scarred by a childhood and adolescence spent as the face of her stepmother’s social media empire, a London woman tries to protect her little sister from the same fate.
Aṅụrị Chinasa is not okay. While she runs two thriving businesses and, at 25, has enough money to afford a two-bedroom apartment in London, she struggles with alcoholism, likes to verbally abuse consenting men online, and is semi-estranged from her father, Nkem, and her stepmother, Ophelia. Enabled by Nkem, Ophelia, a famous blogger, made a name for herself on the back of her experiences raising Aṅụrị, sharing photos, videos, and anecdotes that won her millions of fans and lucrative sponsorships. For Aṅụrị, the material benefits of such fame and fortune couldn’t outweigh the social and emotional drawbacks—constant scrutiny, a lack of anonymity, even a kidnapping attempt—but Nkem and Ophelia didn’t see it that way. When Aṅụrị cut ties with the business at age 18, she was soon replaced by Nkem and Ophelia’s new baby, Noelle. Five years after Noelle’s birth, Aṅụrị, still suffering the ill effects of hypervisibility, sues Ophelia in an attempt to force her stepmother to expunge her social media accounts and commercial ventures of anything Aṅụrị-related. Roughly around the same time, the relentlessly momagered Noelle begins to exhibit worrisome behavior. Concerned for her sister’s welfare, Aṅụrị undertakes a new crusade against the backdrop of the ongoing lawsuit: to liberate Noelle from stardom. For all the righteousness of Aṅụrị’s cause, Nwabineli’s cleareyed narrator resists the temptation to wholly vilify Nkem and Ophelia; brief chapters told from their perspectives, coupled with the narrator’s occasional injections of background information, offer insight into why they made the mistakes they did. In many ways, this novel recalls Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000). Both novels foreground immigrants and immigrant struggles, including racism and xenophobia (Nkem and an infant Aṅụrị emigrated to England from Nigeria after Aṅụrị’s mother died; Ophelia’s contrasting whiteness is a subtle point of tension); both novels have the same sweeping third-person-omniscient point of view, peppered with wry observations about life and humanity. Though it isn’t a modern classic like White Teeth, this novel tells a moving, thought-provoking story that interrogates the toxic and parasocial dynamics associated with influencing.
A parable for the social media age that critiques without resorting to alarmism or preachiness.Pub Date: May 28, 2024
ISBN: 9781525896033
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Graydon House
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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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