The Heart Goes Last

My notes: anaulin.org/blog/book-the-heart-goes-last/

I read a lot of bad reviews of this but I quite liked it and found it funny.

I read a lot of bad reviews of this but I quite liked it and found it funny.

I didn't love this book the way I loved some of Atwood's other works. There are some interesting ideas here, but the characters aren't sympathetic.

This read like a puppet show for me. A good, relevant, funny puppet show that balances some disdain for the puppets with incisive social commentary.

A delightfully twisted dystopian tale, a little bit Stepford and a little bit Soylent.

I love Margaret Atwood; this is not my favorite Margaret Atwood novel. Still compelling and finished in 24 hours. Rather jarring ending. Weak transitions between what were, I have since learned, were the serialized portions of this novel. Central characters not particularly likable--Stan is an Angry Man and rather misogynistic, and Charmaine is absurdly childlike as a weird consequence of ptsd. I was never really convinced by the Positron Project itself--why is the prison component necessary for this planned society? There's no reason everyone couldn't live in their little non-prison houses all the time--other than the darker motives that come to light later in the book. But how would the salesmen ever be able to sell this to potential residents? Because, on the surface at least, the prison isn't necessary.

Dark comedy (?) romp through a close-to-home capitalist consumer-prison world suffused with uncertainly fulfilled sexual fantasies.