Modern Fiction Books > Margaret Atwood Modern Fiction Books

Advantages: the ideas it brings up are very interesting
Disadvantages: can be slow to read

After studying this book for English Literature A level, i felt i could add a few points that haven't been mentioned. We were told to read the book before the start of our course through the summer and i did find it quite slow and the ending somewhat dissapointing. However, if you are willing to go into more depth to discover Atwoods messages through 'Alias Grace', the book becomes something very interesting and different. Atwood writes a story about ...
...murdering her master and his mistress. Throughout the story, readers encounter many different versions of events, including newspaper exerpts from the time of the murders and experts from books. Varying points of view are also presented to show different opinions. This contributes to a fragmented and confused feel. However, this is Atwoods aim in an attempt to recreate the feeling surrounding events at the time, where it seemed getting at the truth ... Read review

Advantages: Good read, with relative themes
Disadvantages: Audio can get tedious at times

...studies, I became privy to Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood during my 20th Century Literature module at university. Having not read many female orientated novels, I felt a little sceptical albeit uneasy at reading a so called 'chick flick'. How wrong I was proved. Atwood highlights relative themes to society through her protagonist Elaine, born in Nova Scotia, Canada. The geography of the story is highly relevant, acknowledging and at some instances ...
...bereft of many emotions (Hence, cat's eye). What I found interesting was how the portrayal of Elaine in Toronto, a bustling city filled with so many scarring memories for her, was replaced for the more serence and picturesque location of Vancouver. Elaine leaves Toronto with her first daughter, after a turbulent relationship with Tom. Who later on in her life she meets and finds a mutual understanding to remain civil with one another. Her emancipation ... Read review

Advantages: Easy to read
Disadvantages: Couldn't put it down!

I managed to consume this book in less than 24 hours by completely forgetting my own life and becoming so absorbed in the heroine's. This book confronts so many issues from body weight to bullying and how we long to escape from our present life to find the ever elusive "happy ever after". I found it easy to read, humorous yet sad. There was just enough left to the imagination to leave questions for the reader that may or may not be answered! It ... Read review

Advantages: You could read and savour them one at a time
Disadvantages: Some of them seem almost too short

Having hungrily devoured several of Margaret Atwood's novels, from 'The Handmaid's Tale' through 'Surfacing' to 'Alias Grace', I was intrigued to see 'Murder in the Dark' described as a collection of 'short fictions and prose poems'. I make several long bus journeys a week, and if you're sandwiched between giggling schoolgirls and someone booming down their mobile phone while the guy at the back is singing along to Alice Cooper on his ipod, it's ...
...page novel. But these little gems take just a couple of minutes each to read and each demands to be savoured before you go on to the next one. 'Autobiography' is a description of a landscape that starts with a blue line and goes on to scan a lake, a white cliff and a forest. The piece ends with the idea that the landscape ceased to be a landscape not because of a visual feature but because of a smell - the smell of a half-eaten carcass of a deer. ... Read review

Advantages: Brilliantly written, vivid characters, wonderful
Disadvantages: none whatsoever

Something about Oryx and Crake appealed to me. I was completely hooked from the start, and felt it was one of her best yet. The story is a futuristic tale of the world of man spiralling into it's own destruction. So not the most cheerful read. The book begins at the end - in fact, the end of the world as we know it - and as the novel progresses, we slowly learn how it has come to that point. The story is of Jimmy, a man who lives on his own in a ...
...of the title, Jimmy's obsession Oryx and his best friend Crake. The novel consists of Jimmy's childhood, his experience as a teenager, and his life as an adult. We don't learn the cause of the death of every living human, nor why Jimmy has survived, until the very end. I don't want to say too much, you will read it all confused, and that's how it should be. The wonder of the story is that she avoids telling us the true cause of the world ending until ... Read review