Hilda C. Landers Library & Archives

Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, a near-future, repressive, uber-christian, New England splinter government that has usurped the United States after assassinating the president and gunning down Congress (Atwood never mentions if the Judicial made it out, but I guess we usually forget them anyway).

The role of a Handmaid is to be an “unworthy vessel.” A vessel for what? Children. In the Republic of Gilead, always on the crusading march to reclaim lost territory, children are a precious national resource. Pollution has made bearing children risky and uncertain business, and the extremely hierarchical Gilead has relegated this compulsory job to the Handmaids, erstwhile women in second marriages or single parenthood. The Handmaids are bred with “Commanders,” the elite of the new order, under the supervision of their Wives. Should one bear a child, it will be taken by the Wives. Should the handmaid fail to conceive, she will be sent to “The Colonies” to clean up nuclear or toxic waste without protective gear.

Offred’s life is a nightmare. She is confined to a small room, banned from reading, banned from talking to others, banned from voicing opinions. But the regime can’t stop Offred from thinking, and telling her story, silently to herself. She tells her story to you, the improbable reader through the ethos.

As an interesting kind of footnote at the end of the novel suggests, the horrific forms the repression of women and sexuality take in The Handmaid’s Tale are hardly novel; Atwood draws on specific historical precedents across the world and time to weave the web of oppression that has so hopelessly ensnared Offred (“Of Fred,” her Commander). But she is not wholly without hope. As Offred notes, “there will always be alliances” and always ghosts in the machine of any political system. She finds herself struggling to survive, first to live, and then to liberate herself.

I first read Handmaid’s Tale when I was in high school, and coming back to the book this summer was a delight. It was a demanding, inventive, read for any tenth grader, and attending to the tropes from various feminisms which play through the narrative were harder to grasp from the vantage point of a fifteen year old boy. I enjoyed this re-read because I am now more familiar with Atwood’s prolific oeuvre, and better able to appreciate a novelist who can juggle many different themes and topics with such terse parsimony of words. Atwood has a penchant for developing viscerally sickening dystopias, and one can find different germs of various elements of dystopia from her more recent Madaddam trilogy in Offred’s narrative. An utterly haunting book that showcases some of Atwood’s finest writing.

Rating: A book pregnant with sharp commentary, rich emotion, and amazing Scrabble words, I recommend it highly.

Availability:  St. Mary’s Library, USMAI and COSMOS
Review Submitted by:  Shane D. Hall
Rating: Highly Recommended

Erudites, who believe that intelligence is vital. The Candor people, who believe that honesty creates trust and loyalty. Amity, who believe that peace creates no evil. Dauntless, who believe that with bravery comes light. And Abnegation, the group that considered selfishness to be the root of all evil. These five factions are the whole of the country in which Divergent is set. Within it, there is Beatrice, an Abnegation who never really fit in, but believes in the way of her faction. Beatrice and her brother Caleb both are of age to attend the Choosing Ceremony, the event in which one may choose to stay with their faction or defect to another. But before that, they must take an aptitude test to see which factions they belong most in. Caleb, although seemingly perfect for Abnegation, is fit to Erudite for his interest in learning more. Beatrice on the other hand, is labeled as Divergent and told to tell no one of her placement. Read the book to find out what it is to be Divergent, and what it means for the nation.

Recommendation: A good summer read!

Availability: SMCM Library, USMAI and COSMOS
Review Submitted by:  Andrew Lachkovic
Rating: Highly Recommended

In 1962, a young American actress, thought to be dying, arrives by boat at a small Italian coastal village called Porto Vergogna. The actress, Dee Moray, is in Italy filming Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Pasquale, the Porto Vergogna innkeeper, immediately falls in love with the beautiful, innocent Dee.

Fifty years after their initial meeting, Pasquale travels to Hollywood to find Michael Deane, a legendary producer who may be the only person who knows what happened to Dee after she left Italy. Pasquale and Deane join Claire Silver (disillusioned Hollywood production assistant) and Shane Wheeler (a struggling screenwriter who describes, in great detail, his Donner Party-inspired script) to search for Dee Moray and discover the truth about her “illness,” her relationship with Richard Burton, and what really happened in Italy in 1962.

Walter’s hilarious descriptions of the disintegration of classic Hollywood into the miasma of reality TV (including biting descriptions of Deane himself) holds together the novel’s sometimes frayed narrative. Beautiful Ruins is full of laughs, and heart – perfect for the beach.

Recommendation: A good summer read!

Availability: SMCM Library, USMAI and COSMOS
Review Submitted by:  Kaitlyn Grigsby
Rating: Recommended

“To sleep perchance to dream– aye there’s the rub.”

The rub indeed! George Orr is a bland, “average” man in a near future, not-so-dystopian but not-so-nice future Portland, Oregon. The remarkable thing that sets George apart is his ability to dream “effectively.” When he dreams effectively the world changes to conform to his dream. He cannot control how and why he dreams, but after he is placed in an obligatory relationship with a psychiatrist who can hypnotize and “suggest” dreams to George, someone can.

But is reality, in all its complexity and history, malleable to even the most benevolent dreams of rational men? You’ll have to read to form your own opinion, but the quote from which the novel’s title is derived offers a suggestion: “To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven.” Chaung Tse: XXII.

A powerful meditation on the Western ideals of rationality, development, science, and human mastery over nature, Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven is a thought-provoking, brief, summer dream.

Rating: If heaven is for real, then surely the Lathe of Heaven is also the real deal. Take head Chaung Tse’s warning.

Availability:  USMAI and COSMOS
Review Submitted by:  Shane D. Hall
Rating: Highly Recommended

With all the hype surrounding John Green’s novels, especially with The Fault in our Stars movie being released in theaters, I was somewhat unwilling to jump on the John Green bandwagon, afraid that his novels wouldn’t live up to their popularity. However, I finished Looking for Alaska in less than two days. An extremely captivating story about Miles “Pudge” Halter’s first year in boarding school in Alabama, Looking for Alaska was a novel that I literally could not put down. Green cleverly heightened suspense by writing the novel in two sections, a “Before” and an “After” section, with the mystery of the event in the middle keeping me engaged. Green’s gift for symbolism and repeating motifs tied the whole novel together beautifully; there is no questioning that this is an extremely well-written novel.

That being said, I did have some criticisms of the book: many of the characters did not feel very realistic, and it took a while for the book to find an actual plot line. However, most of the characters were still likable, if not completely believable; and once a plot line did surface, it only served to captivate my interest more. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys young adult novels, though as a friendly warning, it wouldn’t be a John Green novel if there wasn’t an element of tragedy incorporated into this coming of age story.

Availability:  USMAI and COSMOS
Review Submitted by: Brianna Glase
Rating: Recommended

A few days before I flew to spend the last days of July lounging on the beaches of North Carolina this summer, I picked up Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor. Sag Harbor is a great, thought provoking read that is perfect for getting you excited to go spend a week or two on a bay or ocean beach.

At the heart of this novel is the search for an “authentic identity,” one that has always resided within the self of community but has been overlooked or concealed from the searcher. There are no more fervent or doomed searchers than teenagers, and Whitehead loops his larger commentary on identity, particularly the “paradoxical” identity of upper-middle class African American identity in the post-Jim Crow era, around two brothers: Benji and Reggie. The boys are vacationing in Sag Harbor on Long Island, NY, an erstwhile whaling community that has become a vacationing site for successful New York and New Jersey African Americans. Benji is on a mission in Sag Harbor: to reshape his identity from a nerd who is an outsider at a “predominantly white” prep school during the year to a cool, sexy, hero. He narrates his foibles and follies to hilarious and poignant effect.

Although Benji’s relentless comic asides and episodic anecdotes give SH a meandering quality, the narrator’s stories weave a narrative web as tenacious as beach-grass roots, ramifying out in all directions to gather the grains of sand and stake out a claim next to the sea. I appreciated that Benji’s “adventures,” such as they are, remain consistently mundane and realistic. There’s no great arc toward the nerd finally finding love on the beach or some apocalyptic Separate Peace confrontation between the two brothers whom the reader is introduced to as “former twins heading in opposite directions” at the start of the novel. The adventures of Benji, Reggie, and there “gang” of friends are the kinds of banal, ill-conceived, anti-climactic, exaggerated, silly kinds of antics teenagers actually get into outside of made for TV miniseries with dramatic muzak accompaniment.

Through the mode of the bildungsroman, Whitehead uses this coming of age story to probe the ways in which individual and community identity are fashioned, displayed, hidden, refashioned, abandoned, and adopted as only a fifteen year old nerd can so obsess over. The book makes the reader question how these different identities are built and torn down in one’s own life and the life of society.

While I recommend this novel unequivocally, I would recommend some of Whitehead’s other novels more ardently to readers unfamiliar with one of contemporary fiction’s finest authors. In order: 1. John Henry Days, 2. The Intuitionist, 3. Zone One.

Harbor no other beach reads until you read this book (and others by the inimitable Mr. Whitehead).

Availability: SMCM Library, USMAI and COSMOS
Review Submitted by:  Shane D. Hall
Rating: Recommended

This week Edan Lepucki’s California, a dystopic near-future narrative about a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, debuted on the New York Times Bestsellers List at number 3, allegedly with the aid of the infamous “Colbert-Bump.” But before you take up this timely future-cast, I recommend you pick up the ever prescient and entertaining Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, which in my mind defined the whole near-future dystopia in LA genre. I recently re-read Parable in Spring/Summer course I taught on “environmental futures” and forgot to write up a review until reading a review of Lepucki’s book.

Parable takes the form of the diary of Laura Olamina, the daughter of a Baptist preacher who lives with her family in a middle-class community called Robledo, outside of Los Angeles in 2024. Anthropogenic Climate Change, neoliberal economic policies (like NAFTA, Reaganomics, etc.), and rising crime/drug addiction have rendered Southern California a veritable Golgotha, or some other hellish slumlandia one can scavenge from one’s lifetime exposure to modern day Dickensian poverty imagery (think Biafra starvation picks plus Escape from New York and Road Warrior). Many residents in areas like Robledo hide behind walls, hoping to keep out the rising scourge of violence and poverty, while others take to the desolate US route 101 or I-5 corridor to travel north to Oregon and Washington, where water (and jobs) are rumored to be more plentiful.

Laura dreams of a life where she doesn’t have to live in fear of the outside violence or the suffocating closeness of hiding behind the walls. She also begins to imagine a religion of her own, called Earhseed, which helps people find a meaningful life on Earth while looking towards humanity’s destiny: to take root among the stars.

At the University of Oregon, where roughly half the students hail from California, The Parable of the Sower was a devilishly fun book to teach. Butler’s narrative of forced migration and armed lifeboats amidst a sea of social/ecological disaster remind readers (but especially my Californian students-turned-temporary-Oregonians) of the privileges of high consumption, free/rapid movement, and reliable access to social services like medical care, police protection, that some of us enjoy more than others. Butler’s novel stands as a stark reminder of the injustices present in society today, and a warning that in a world of “starved economies and tortured ecology” inequalities and social violence are often exacerbated by the relentless consumption that fuels our lives. Butler’s often grotesque narrative remains “realistic” in the sense that the web of oppression she weaves for her characters to struggle within is made of the same strands (individual and institutional racism, economic exploitation, and environmental injustice) that shoot through the fabric of American society today.

Written in 1994, it was eerily reading Parable in 2014. Laura records in her diary an outbreak of measles (see the Midwest today), abundant, devastating hurricanes and tornadoes (see decade) and massive wildfires rolling over a parched West (see Washington south to Baja). But the elevated social violence and depleted social safety nets envisioned in the novel are far and away worse than current conditions. Indeed, if there is a major misstep in this book, I think it is in Butler’s reliance on what some scholars of food aid call “poverty porn” to underscore to social decay her novel cautions against. It is hard to think of an American society so degraded that little children would gnaw on the leg of a junkie shot dead on a street and left to rot. I know the Reagan and Bush years where tough, but come on! Still, we are talking about a sci-fi book, not a documentary of things to come.

Rating: Some reads fall on the path, and are trodden upon or kicked to the wayside, some reads are cast among thorns (like True Detective) and choked out due to superior competition, and other reads fall on the good shelf, the one you’ll go to and find a great summer read. This book’s the latter.

Availability: USMAI and COSMOS
Review Submitted by:  Shane D. Hall
Rating: Highly Recommended

Evie Wyld’s fascinating, disturbing novel follows the troubled life of a young woman named Jake Whyte. The story is told in alternating chapters – present and past. The present is set on a sheep farm on rainy island off Great Britain, where Jake tries to discover who (or what) is attacking her sheep. The chapters located in the past move backward, so that the reader ends the novel in Jake’s childhood in Australia.

Because of the novel’s structure, Jake’s devastating history is told in layers, revealing more and more of the unfortunate events that brought her to the sheep farm. Teenage prostitution and violence are only some of the psychological scars that Jake bears, in addition to the physical scars that mar her back. Wyld’s Jake is unforgettable.

All the Birds, Singing, is terribly beautiful. A must read!

Availability: USMAI and COSMOS
Review Submitted by:  Kaitlyn Grigsby
Rating: Must Read

The Silkworm is the second novel in J.K. Rowling’s series following private investigator Cormoran Strike. The sequel to The Cuckoo’s Calling (2013), The Silkworm catches up with Cormoran Strike and his assistant, Robin Ellacott, less than a year after the successful resolution of the Lula Landry case. Leonora Quine hires Strike to locate her missing husband, the author Owen Quine. Strike soon discovers that Quine’s disappearance coincided with the leak of his latest manuscript – a dark, unpublishable allegory that includes thinly veiled metaphors of his professional rivals and personal enemies.

This missing person case becomes a murder investigation when Strike discovers the author’s body, arranged exactly as described in the leaked manuscript. Strike and Ellacott’s professional relationship becomes strained as they struggle to discover the murderer, who may also be the real author of Quine’s manuscript.

Fans of the Harry Potter series will find much to love in both of Rowling’s detective novels. Descriptive, playful, and inventive, The Silkworm is a page-turner that is also great fun to read! I look forward to reading more about Cormoran Strike in Rowling’s next installment, due out in 2015.

Availability: USMAI and COSMOS
Review Submitted by:  Kaitlyn Grigsby
Rating: Highly Recommended

I’ve been on a bit of a “plague kick” lately, having just read Mary Shelly’s The Last Man and watched 28 Days Later, and think, after reading The Rag Doll Plagues by Alejandro Morales that perhaps it’s time to take a break and read some lighter subject matter.

The Rag Doll Plagues is broken into three narratives that each resonate in both narrative voice and plot. The first story takes place in colonial Mexico, where a mysterious plague called “La Mona” turns thousands into what the chief colonial physician alternatively describes as “bags of pus,” “blood sausages,” or “the living dead.” Unfailingly lethal, La Mona is described as a “just” disease because it takes the lives of the poor, the rich, the indigenous as well as the Europeans (who overall tended to import diseases to the “New World” at and after Contact). The second narrative takes place in Orange County, CA in the 1980s during the initial AIDS outbreak. Narrating this tale of disease and the social forces which both structure its spread and containment is another doctor, Gregory, trying to suture the wounds of gangland violence and AIDS-doomed hemophiliac wounds of his wife, Sandra. The third tale takes place in a relatively dystopic twenty-second century Los Angeles-Mexico City industrial corridor of the “Triple Alliance” (think NAFTA or something like it fully merged Canada, the US, Mexico, and a spike of Chinese ex-patriots inhabiting all three nations). Gregory, the grandson of our last Gregory, is a doctor who finds that Mexican residents of Mexico City have somehow evolved or mutated to resist the “hyperbolically polluted” Mexico City and that simple blood transfusions using Mexican blood can cure the new myriad diseases caused by the pervasive industrial waste that has marked the twenty-first and second centuries as a time of “ecological disaster.” The race to commodify Mexican blood, which Gregory wryly notes is by no means a new pursuit, is on!

So… yes, this is a wild book full of blood, gore, and also love, humor, and social-political commentary. At the heart of each narrative is the story of widespread environmental injustice, as racist and profit-driven political systems construct terrible infrastructure which either directly brings about the plague in question or exacerbates its virulence. The scientific acumen of the doctor-narrators is challenged and exposed as but a limited tool against the monsters which perhaps can only be tamed with socially and environmentally equitable political structures. It is a gruesome and disconcerting novel that takes on the transhistorical sweep of a horrific dream you know, at some level, you already wake and sleep through today.

Rating: “The kind of infectious you want to spread around” — quote from the Christopher Guest film, A Mighty Wind.

Availability: USMAI
Review Submitted by:  Shane D. Hall
Rating: Highly Recommended