I liked this a lot, even if the central message can be boiled down to “power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and that’s as provocative a statement as “water is wet.” A frame tale where academics use historical documents to reconstruct a past much like our present as gender imbalance creates a crisis point and reveal their own biases in the interpretation is gonna get compared to Margaret Atwood for obvious reasons. To say this is not The Handmaid’s Tale is no slight to Alderman; […]
“For if the world treats you well, Sir, you come to believe you are deserving of it. ”
Alias Grace is Margaret Atwood’s imagining of the true story of Grace Marks, a convicted (and later pardoned) murderess… “Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word—musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase. Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself: Murderess, Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor.” … in 19th century Canada whose sensationalistic trial left doubt as to the nature of her involvement in the double […]
A modern Shakespeare
What a fabulous read!!! I am a big fan of Shakespeare and am fast becoming a big fan of Margaret Atwood. This book is a modern take of The Tempest. What is fascinating about it, compared to other modern adaptations is the way is winds the play within the story, with the story itself. The story follows Felix, an Artistic Director. It begins with him preparing to put on the play, The Tempest. You learn that both his wife and more recently daughter, have passed […]
A hilarious and heartwarming book. J/k, it’s Margaret Atwood.
This is the May book club pick of my local library, and I was a little disappointed only because I wasn’t looking forward to rereading it. I am a huuuuuge Atwood fan and was hoping to dig into something new. Well, the joke is on me because I realized that I had somehow conflated this book with Anita Diamant’s “The Red Tent” and I had somehow never read it. For shame. And how appropriate to kick off a review of “The Handmaid’s Tale” with a […]
Novel Within a Novel
Since I started Cannonball Read, I’ve tended to think, to varying degrees, about what I might write in a review as I’ve read each book. I didn’t do that much with this one, which I think is a testament to how engrossing it was. The main narrative frame is from the perspective of Iris Griffen (née Chase), a widowed woman in her 80s who has a heart condition and is trying to document her life before she dies: “It’s a slow race now, between me […]
Margaret Atwood gets weird, y’all
A coworker recommended this one after I’d said I’d watched and really, really liked Alias Grace. Before this, the only Atwood book I had read was Handmaid’s Tale and while this also deals with a dystopian future and the end of humanity as we know it, it’s more of a science fiction than philosophical end. It is also waaaay too clearly just the first book in a series. Like The Hobbit took one book and divided it into three movies – I feel like Oryx and Crake took one movie […]
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