Alias Grace

Alias Grace

by Margaret Atwood

★★★★

One of the things I admire about Atwood’s work is her willingness to try new genres and styles. She writes dystopian novels, mysteries, character studies, etc. They’re never formulaic and this one is just as unique as her others. She’s not an author that writes the same book over and over again and so you never know what you’ll get, but you know it will be captivating.

Grace Marks was a real Canadian prisoner convicted of murder in 1843. Her story has inspired rumors and novels over the past 150 years and Atwood is the latest in a long line of Canadians to become fascinated by the murderess. The question of her guilt or innocence has been a matter of debate and in this novel Atwood tells the story from two rotating points-of-view: Marks herself and her fictional doctor Simon.  

It was a slow start for me. I found Grace’s story enthralling, but got lost in the minutia of Simon’s life. Once we got to Grace’s horrific journey from Ireland to Canada I was hooked. The story continued to lag for me whenever we switched to Simon’s POV, but it kept a steady pace.

I loved the way Atwood incorporated real excerpts from newspaper and the trial into the beginning of each chapter. When it comes to historical fiction I love to learn something while being told an interesting story. Atwood manages to do both while at the same time maintaining an air of ambiguity in the story. She leaves some questions unanswered, which works well. As Grace’s history unfolds we learn that she has been through multiple traumatic experiences in her short life. The author deftly builds a case both for and against Grace’s possible guilt, dipping into the territory of psychological study.

BOTTOM LINE: An interesting historical fiction novel about a murder I’d never heard of before. It's a bit slow in parts, but overall a good read that delves past the known facts into the question of true guilt. Another fantastic example of Atwood’s versatility as a writer!

Thanks to Care for convincing me to impulse read this one!

Image from here. 

Greek Week Announcement

This is sort of a grown-up bibliophile’s version of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. At the beginning of the month I started The Song of Achilles for Care’s readalong. I was loving it, but I was also reading it too fast. It made me think about all the tales of Greek mythology I’d read over the years and all the ones I hadn’t. So I got my copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology off the shelf and started reading it.

That led me to start thinking about all the different movies I’d seen that were set in ancient Greece. This was a slippery slope because there are tons of them; some good and some awful, but usually fun!

Then I remembered how much I’d enjoyed Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series and that he had a new series I’d wanted to check out. So I got The Lost Hero (the first book in that series), from the library.

Then I remembered I needed to read a play for Fanda’s Let’s Read Plays monthly challenge. And that led me to another Greek book, The Oresteia play trilogy by Aeschylus.  

So anyway, things got out of control quickly and I was surrounded by a stack of Greek themed books and Greek Week was born! I decided to post about all the crazy gods and their wrath and sneakiness throughout this week to share my craziness with all of you.

And I’ve now learned that if you give a bibliophile a good book on a topic they love, there’s no telling where they’ll end up.

Images from here, here and here. 

Breaking Bad and Gone Girl

 

Everyone and their brother has already read and reviewed Gone Girl at this point. So instead of rehashing the plot I want to do something a bit different. Breaking Bad is one of my favorite shows on TV. There were elements of Gone Girl that reminded me a lot of the show so I thought I’d do a bit of a comparison.

 

**I will spoil nothing from Breaking Bad, but don’t read on if you haven’t already read Gone Girl. Instead, go read one of these great reviews and then go read the book!**

 

Now in its fifth season Breaking Bad continues to get better and better. It’s brilliantly written and it never fails to surprise me. The character development, the moral dilemmas, the gray areas that quickly become black and white, it’s just so well done!

 

One interesting aspect of the show is the marital relationship between Walter and Skyler White. Walter is a mild-mannered former high school chemistry professor who abandons his job when he’s diagnosed with cancer in the pilot. He decides to use his scientific knowledge to cook meth instead so he can leave his family enough money to survive when he dies. Skyler is his strong-willed wife who is unaware of his new career choices.

 

Throughout the course of the show their relationship vastly changes. Just like the married couple in Gone Girl, we start peeling back the layers and seeing a very different dynamic at the core. Both couples seem to be playing a perpetual game of chess. One will make a decision and the other carefully contemplates their strategy before making their own move.

 

Like Nick and Amy in Gone Girl, there are always secrets and the pair are never quite sure where they stand with each other. Also like our young Gone Girl couple, they seem so perfect and happy from the outside.

 

When TV or books are done right characters are multi-layered. Their motivations aren’t cut and dry. There’s growth and change and in both Breaking Bad and Gone Girl we see this happen.

 

BOTTOM LINE: The book is really good, go read it and enjoy. Breaking Bad is incredible, rent the first season and thank me later. 

 

Image form here. 

The City and The City

The City and The City
By China Mieville
★★

Here’s the basic premise: a murdered woman is found and a detective tries to solve the case. Sounds straight forward right? But in this book nothing is quite that simple. Yes, there is a dead body but it’s in one city and the detectives think it might have come from the second city, which shares the same location, but not the same legal or social space.

People living in the two cities, Ul Qoma and Besźel, are supposed to “unsee” the other city in their daily lives. So as they walk down the street they must not acknowledge the people and shops they see if they aren’t in their city. On top of all of that there is a legend of a city between the two cities, but no one knows if it exists or not. The more the detective looks into the murder the more coincidences he discovers and he begins to wonder if there isn’t a bigger conspiracy.

Got that? No? Yeah, that’s the problem. This book seems to be so proud of its clever concept that it never allows itself to become a good story. I do think the idea is a great one, but Mieville kept hitting me over the head with it. The old-school noir style is fun, but the language and other plot tricks make the rest of the book so convoluted that I felt like I could never just enjoy it. Imagine a Raymond Chandler book set on the moon, but with a second moon inside of it that no one is allowed to talk about, but that might be trying to kill them. That would be a bit like this.

Here’s the thing, I really struggled with this one. After the first 50 pages or so, I never wanted to pick it up, it felt like a chore. I’d read 30 pages and put it down and dread the next time I was going to read it. I felt like the author relied pretty heavily on his gimmick and that was off-putting for me.

BOTTOM LINE: Although I appreciate the clever story line, in the end it was just one of those books that I didn’t want to pick up. If you can get into the story it might work for you

A few other thoughts:

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A Stripied Armchair

Image from here.