Review:Once upon a time, I joked that Margaret Atwood could write about a walk to the grocery store in such a way that it became a dangerous, harrowing, terrifying experience that prompted readers to question every aspect of the universe. Such a walk could lead to a deep examination of every facet of the human experience, and in analyzing our collected data, we would find ourselves severely lacking. Anyone we passed on the three block walk to the store would make us hyper aware of our flaws, our shortc... Read more

Review:Margaret Atwood's most recent work, The Blind Assassin, is a masterful piece of prose.
The book attempts a feat of immense proportions. Iris Griffin-Chase, the narrator, is a woman in her mid-eighties. She is in the process of writing her memoirs, and in the process sharing them with us. Not only does she tell of her life, however, but she intersperses sections of a novel written by her sister, Laura Chase, who died tragically at a young age under mysterious circumstances. The ending is a... Read more

Review:"Alias Grace" is Margaret Atwood's finest novel after "Cat's Eye." Stylistically, through its elegant parodies, it is a love letter to classic nineteenth-century fiction. If you enjoy Dickens, Scott, Thackeray, Melville, or Twain, for example, you'll love this novel. If you never heard of, much less read, any of those other authors, you may still love this novel. Yet philosophically, "Alias Grace" is thoroughly post-modern. Experience, Atwood tells us, is compartmentalized, like the mind, l... Read more

Review:In my late teens and early twenties Margaret Atwood was one of my favorite writers.... and then she got weird. I just finished reading her new book The Heart Goes Last. How disappointing. None of the characters were likeable and the story was both far fetched and kind of raunchy in a "gross-why-am-i-reading-this?" sort of way. Don't waste your time or money. Read more

Review:About 600 BCE, the Lydians of ancient Turkey (which was then called Anatolia) began forming lumps of a natural alloy of gold and silver called electrum and stamping them with official symbols. Thus the "striking of coins" began and within 50 years most major trading cities were issuing coins, especially the cities of ancient Greece. An interesting development in this regard was the two-sided coin, with an "obverse" side (H), deemed the most important and usually decorated with the head of a rule... Read more

Review:Elaine prefers to be called a painter rather than an artist and is in Toronto for a retrospective of her work. This novel is a retrospective of her life, which was happy until her family moved there while she and her brother Stephen were children. Her parents are a bit nebulous and beyond eccentric. Her father is an entomologist who settles his family in Toronto when he takes a college teaching job. After a nomadic life in motels and campgrounds prior to that point, Elaine is not equipped fo... Read more

Review:Atwood had already pulled off the post-apocalyptic setting in Oryx and Crake without coming across as trite or far-fetched, so recounting the events leading up to The Flood from women's perspectives seemed like it should have been an effortless task for a writer of Atwood's skill. Unfortunately, all the subtleties of the first novel were not present in TYOTF and Atwood's observations on women, which are usually among the best in literature, came across as superficial.

The beauty of Oryx a... Read more

Review:Margaret Atwood's story woven around Shakespeare's The Tempest, is a unique, entertaining tale. It is the story of a play, within a story, within a play, within a story. It is an enjoyable read, and great choice for the Hogarth Shakespeare series. Read more

Review:My mother-in-law is a big fan of Margaret Atwood and she passed this book along to me. We don't have the same taste in books, so I was a little wary at first. I shouldn't have been! This is a great story for anyone that likes to read interesting, intriguing stories.

Atwood starts you off in the present and introduces you to the four main characters of the story. Then you are taken back in the past to lean of each characters history. Then the book comes back to the present. It is not... Read more

Review:How to Write A Simple Book Review by Allyson R. Abbott is a great and informative book.

I have always wanted to write reviews on the books I read, but I always felt that my reviews were unintelligent and just plain bad. With this book, l learned some guidelines to follow and that there is not really a way to mess up a review if, you are giving your exact feelings on the book.

I definitely like how the author says that the review doesn't have to be super lengthy to be a good review.... Read more