PositiveThe Women\'s Review of Books... guides readers through an adventurous writing career that spans—and, in its way, refles—several decades of the twentieth century ... The posthumously published work included in Machines in the Head is generally less interesting than what’s come before. While Kavan’s decadeslong addiction to morphine is perhaps the most sensational detail in her extraordinary life, the stories that explicitly address the drug—\'The Old Address\' and \'Julia and the Bazooka\'—are among the author’s least compelling. The previously unpublished \'Starting a Career\' will likely be more interesting to Kavan’s existing fans than her new readers. Editor Victoria Walker makes it clear in her foreword that she chose to include pieces that are not necessarily successful but are nonetheless representative of Kavan’s formal innovations. This is a smart decision on Walker’s part, one that makes Machines in the Head an indispensable introduction to an author who is known—to the extent that she is known at all—as an influence more than an artist ... Kavan deserves recognition among the progenitors and practitioners of speculative fiction in the twentieth century but, even beyond that, her fiction is valuable for limning a world in which existing freely—as a woman, especially, but also as any kind of outsider—is essentially impossible.
Margaret Atwood
MixedThe Women’s Review of BooksCurrent discussion of The Handmaid’s Tale tends to center on ways in which American politics and attitudes feel appallingly close to those of Gilead ... What gets lost in these analyses is what an extraordinary piece of literature The Handmaid’s Tale is. The story is fueled by a sense of urgency and shaped by intimacy ... There are traces here and there of this stylistic genius throughout The Testaments, but they are rare. The story moves along briskly enough, but this book is about a hundred pages longer than The Handmaid’s Tale, and none of that length feels necessary. There’s a great deal of detail that adds nothing vital to what we know of Gilead, its citizens, or its enemies. Paired with the problems in character development, all this means that this sequel is not quite the masterpiece its predecessor is. Which is not to say that it’s terrible. Read as a novel of suspense, it’s satisfying enough. The best way to approach it, though, might be as fanfiction. This is not an insult. Fan-authored stories using established characters and settings have long been a vibrant part of fantasy and science-fiction culture. Fanfic is driven by a reader’s desire to know more about a favorite character or a beloved world by inventing more, and this longing doesn’t sound all that different than what Atwood said inspired The Testaments ... There’s a whole community of fans exploring the Republic of Gilead on their own, and their imaginations are not bounded by Atwood’s text.
