"The Robber Bride," by Margaret Atwood

FM's rating:

1. Premise 7 
2. Prose 10

3. Plot 6
4. Characters 9
5. Overall 8

Comments (optional – but try to keep it under 3000 words!)

Atwood is utterly brilliant.  Her prose is second to none. “The Handmaid’s Tale” is enough by itself to win her a place in the history of literature, much like Harper Lee’s single work, “To Kill a Mockingbird.”  BUT.  Atwood’s longer works, as brilliantly written and plotted as they are, become tedious for me.  That’s because she is one of those authors – much like John Irving, who I also very much admire but who can also be tedious - whose novels are character-driven, not story-driven.  They tell the story through the process of character development, so to speak.  This entails giving lots of “back-story” which, to me, always feels like putting the “real” story on hold, while we take a long look at events in the characters’ pasts.  Sigh.  Does this technique give the novel more depth?  Yes!  Does it help us relate to the characters?  Yes!  It does lots of good things.  But it makes the book tedious for many of us.  I get so bogged down in the histories of the characters that I have to alternate reading sections of the book with reading sections of a different book that develops the characters through the process of telling the story.