I’ve been hearing about Margaret Atwood for a while now, but it was only recently that I began to read her novels. And now I simply can’t get enough of them. 

So I decided to go on here to write my first review on one of her books.

Alias Grace

In her book, Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood takes us back to the nineteenth century to tell us the story of Grace Marks, an Irish immigrant, who gets convicted for her involvement in the brutal murders of her employer, Thomas Kinnear, and Nancy Montgomery, his housekeeper and mistress, to which she claims she has no memory at all.  To discern her character’s status as murderer or merely accomplice, the author spins the controversy every which way possible, leaving us with only one question in mind.  Is she guilty or not?

What gets me the most about Atwood, though, besides the plot, mystery, creativity, and character development of the story, are the depth and complexity of her sentences. 
This is my favorite passage in the book, which consists only of a few sentences.  But how much substance does it hold!  Take a look:

“It is morning, and time to get up; and today I must go on with the story.  Or the story must go on with me, carrying me inside it, along the track it must travel, straight to the end, weeping like a train and deaf and single-eyed and locked tight shut; although I hurl myself against the walls of it and scream and cry, and beg to God to let me out.

When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it.  It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all.  When you are telling it, to yourself or someone else.”

These lines cut straight to my heart, and it suddenly clicked in my mind what the author was trying to show all along; they, these sentences alone, hold the vital point of the book; the trick that Atwood is playing.  Or at least, that’s what I think.  What is that point?

Read the book and fill in the blanks: Like the author of the book says at the end, “the true, historical character of Grace Marks will always remain an ¬______.”