Books by author: Margaret Atwood

Grace Marks was convicted of murder during the mid-nineteenth century, and she spent most of her life in prison, though history is somewhat unclear about her guilt or innocence. In this novel, Margaret Atwood takes the known facts of the case and fills in the blanks with her imagination, yielding a plausible but dull story.

Most of the novel consists of the interactions between Grace and her confessor, a proto-psychologist named Dr. Simon Jordan. We hear Grace's own words as she tells her story to Dr. Jordan, but we're also privy to certain things happening around her of which she is not aware. Atwood's explanation of the murderous events is quite believable.

There are some interesting elements here, but Grace is a long-winded narrator. There are lots of details that create an intricate character portrait, but I frankly found them to be boring, and I struggled to finish the novel.

This was recommended by Adam (and after the fact by Eric ). In The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood tells the dystopic story of a young woman in a near-future society (apparently centered in Cambridge, with Harvard Yard as the thinly-disguised centerpiece) where most women are valuable only for their wombs. As in Erickson's Arc d'X, the central themes are freedom and slavery, and Atwood similarly asks: "what do we mean by freedom and what are its forms?" The Handmaid's Tale is extremely approachable and would be readable by almost anyone, but Atwood reaches beyond the apparent 10th grade readability with a consistency of metaphor and an ability to show without telling that reveals her strong talents. While this novel did not drastically alter my worldview, it made me think, which is to be commended.