Rated of 5
by ticeeblue i love margaret atwood but i do kinda feel sorry for her, she seems so miserable, nothing ever has a happy ending, which is most people's lives of course. but at least she seems content in her misery. also her writing style is AWESOME!
Rated of 5
by SMN
This book is nothing short of a masterpiece! Atwood takes one book and it holds four storys and put them into one book. The story takes you to places you never could think of. The words of Atwood flow from the pen with easy. I loved this book!
Rated of 5
by Ceri
I found the book convoluted and confusing. Having said that with sheer purserverence (book club commitments) and patience I manged to unwrap each layer within the book! was it worth it ? not really...
aged 40
Rated of 5
by Mercedes
More info on the characters physical appearance would have helped in my novel study on Margaret Atwood. At points, it was difficult to understand, and also slow areas which caused you to wonder whether you should keep reading or give it up. Overall a good, but LONG read! :)
Rated of 5
by Debbie
This was one of the worst books I have ever read. You never learned anything about the characters and who they were. The book started out confusing, jumping back and forth to different topics, very difficult to keep your interest.
Rated of 5
by Veronica
My husband bought me this on the strength of Amazon telling him that people who bought Alice Munro books also liked Margaret Atwood. I'm not sure what the similarity could be, apart from the fact that they are both Canadian. If Alice Munro stories are as intricate and delicate as an intaglio brooch, on the evidence of "The Blind Assassin" Margaret Atwood's novels are like unwieldy cabin trunks bulging with old clothes, scraps of paper, newsclippings, and tattered notebooks.
This is a long book and like other reviewers it took me a while to get into it -- for the first 100 pages I really wasn't sure whether I would finish it. It starts out with an elderly woman, Iris Chase, looking back at her childhood with her younger sister Laura in a country mansion near Toronto during the 1920s and 30s. Their father owns a local button factory, brough to the brink of ruin by the Depression. At the age of 17, Iris marries (or is married off to) one of his competitors in the belief that her father's business will be saved as a result, but things don't turn out quite the way she thought they would. This story is interspersed with extracts from newspapers spanning 60 years, hinting at the family's trials and tribulations, and instalments of Laura's posthumously published novel, in which a story of doomed lovers mingles with thirties pulp science fiction featuring spaceships, scaly aliens, sacrificed princesses, and "undead" green women with purple hair and pointy breasts.
Confused? You will be ... but gradually I was drawn into the story, and the apparently conflicting parts of it started to slot together, the disordered cabin trunk turning into a Rubik's cube. You start to wonder how the repressed, exploited and apparently passive young Iris turns into the acerbic, often witty old lady who is telling the tale. Strange parallels appear between science fiction and real life. At the same time, Atwood drops subtle hints that this pattern is not telling quite the whole story -- there is still something hidden. I started to suspect at least part of the dénouement about 300 pages in, but I was still so riveted by the last 100 pages that I stayed up late to finish them, rather than put the book down. It's not just a gripping story/stories, or a feminist/political tract though -- it's about all sorts of other things as well, including why and how writers turn life into fiction. Marvellous -- I'm really glad I read it. I also *highly* recommend "Alias Grace" -- a totally different approach, but equally compelling. For my money, Atwood is one of the greatest modern novelists, and she grows greater with every book.
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of 5
by ticeeblue 
of 5
by SMN 
of 5
by Ceri 
of 5
by Mercedes 
of 5
by Debbie 
