This one took me a long time to get into -- throughout the first half, I felt like I was reading dutifully ("It's Margaret Atwood, you can't just stop reading a book by Margaret Atwood") and it took a long time to get through. But right around the halfway point the book starts making connections between three of the novel's separate stories (the narrator Iris and her sister Laura as children and young women, a novel within a novel, and the pulp sci-fi story contained within that novel) so that we begin to understand how the fourth story (Iris as an old woman) came about. From that point on, I was riveted.

The good:
1. It's Margaret Atwood. I don't think she could write a bad book if she tried.

2. I actually stayed up reading till 4am one night because I just couldn't put it down. It's been a long time since I was that invested in a book.

3. Margaret Atwood knows what words mean and how to put them together to form sentences that make sense and aren't trying too hard to be "literary". She just writes sentences that people might actually say using words that people might actually use. I realize this probably sounds like a strange thing to praise, but some writers don't know how (or don't want) to do this. It's nice to read a "literary" book that isn't bogged down with overreaching (and, uh, crappy) language.

4. It's mostly linear, but because it's narrated in the present by Iris as an old woman who obviously knows all of the events she's telling us about, sometimes we learn something important that hasn't happened yet, something so far removed from the current events of the story that it becomes a small mystery as to how Atwood will get us from point A to point B. Not just "what happens next?" but the more interesting question, "how and why did that happen at all?"

5. Iris and Laura are victimized and disempowered, but in very different ways. It's hard to be a woman in a patriarchal society, but that doesn't mean every woman has the same experience.

The bad:
1. It's over 500 pages long, and it took 250 pages to get into it. That's a lot of pages to read on faith.

2. The novel within the novel is celebrated as a modernist classic. But it lacks the characteristic features of modernist literature and was written after the modernist period is considered to have ended. It's also not really "a classic" (if nothing else, the pulpy sci-fi story-within-the-novel-within-the-novel would keep it from being a classic). Margaret Atwood is smart, I'm sure she knows lots about modernist literature and books that become classics. Is this supposed to be a comment about literary criticism and the publishing industry? I wasn't sure.