June 4, 2006

The Robber Bride

I just reread my first book. I finished The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood, which I read in 1994 and liked. Significantly, I found a one dollar and a two dollar bill inside it, as well as a bookmark from Victoria College. And so, when I last read this book I was fifteen, and I suspect just awed by a window into the weird and sordid world of adulthood. This time around, I caught the more subtle details and was able to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each of the characters, and that Zenia was one hundred percent pure evil. It’s difficult, when you are younger, to evaluate characters like that. Good or evil, twenty-six or sixty-two, they were all sort of the same. They were Women!. I got more of a sense of the greater themes of the work, the significance of war in particular. The book started off slow for me but once I got into the backstories, I was hooked. An excellently constructed narrative. I enjoyed it very much.