Remember When the Music

Jonathan Franzen is one of today’s most undeniably talented and intelligent writers and, currently, he is pretty much on top of the world. His most recent novel, Freedom, is being declared the new definitive American novel, a masterpiece, a story that defines a generation, etc. etc. I was first introduced to him when a friend suggested I read The Corrections, his second full length novel. She prefaced her suggestion by assuring me that it would not be an easy read, however it would prove to be a very worthwhile one. I came upon a series of essays by the author, however, before I turned to any of his works of fiction. The essays compiled in Franzen’s collection entitled How to Be Alone were beautifully written, intelligently constructed, thought-provoking, and completely relatable. When I made it to The Corrections, I was enraptured by Franzen’s story-telling ability, the way in which he created a riveting family saga that covers all the humor, nostalgia, sentimentality, conflict, and monotony of family life. I’ll refrain from raving about these works for now but let it be known, I was eager to read Freedom, despite all the hype, the controversy with Oprah, and the predictions of greatness, simply because of my genuine love for Franzen’s work.

Like The Corrections, Freedom is a book about the modern American family, a snapshot of one dysfunctional and disparate family struggling to make sense of the world today and their place in it. When I considered why Franzen selected the title Freedom, I realized how this novel explores the ways in which family life can encourage and inhibit our freedom, and how central this struggle is to daily family life. Freedom is certainly at the center of it all, both our freedoms to and our freedoms from, freedoms both real and imagined, both implicated and explicit. Franzen created a novel that surveys one of the most prized and predominant American values in the context of modern family life.

In the Berglund family depicted in Freedom, Walter is the do-gooder father, a hopelessly devoted husband and environmental advocate working for the Nature Conservancy. We’re almost misled to believe that he is most like us – the sane one, the most relatable and reliable character. In time, however, we learn that no character is so easily categorized or trusted. Sure, Walter presumes the picture of normality, but ultimately reveals moments of radical extremism that wreck havoc on himself and his family.

Then there’s Walter’s wife Patty. A college athlete, she never knew much outside of basketball and an ambition to win. Her relationships have all been defined by what she gets out of them – her closest friend from college loved Patty to a confidence boosting degree, Patty’s favorite thing about Walter is his unconditional love for her, the security he provides. Though she may seem the picture of the perfect stay-at-home mom, blessed with an adoring husband and perfect children, Franzen once again proves that things are never as simple as they seem when Patty is challenged by the friend who drew her to Walter in the first place.

And then there is the Berglund’s daughter Jessica, a type-A personality who is distanced from her mother on account of Patty’s overwhelming love and devotion to Joey, her youngest offspring. We follow the course of the children’s lives, jumping back and forth in time to see where Jessica and Joey go in relation to where their parents have been. The children experiment with an array of moral and political leanings and their own changing attitudes toward the Berglunds, all while confronting the disparity between their expectations and reality of adult life.

Freedom is not just about the family in modern America – it truly is about freedom and the ways in which it manifests itself in 21st century America. This is a novel about our responsibility to the world and what we have been told the world owes to us. Franzen confronts the issues of how to deal with the freedom, or lack thereof, that modern culture affords each and every American citizen. The Berglunds live in a world where freedom comes at the price of figuring out what exactly to do with it. A world where people are free to be like everyone else, to join the masses and never think about a thing for themselves, to blindly follow the herd and do as they’re told. But also a world where true freedom is never quite free, where every decision carries the weight of moral and political implications, where nothing is so isolated and unfettered as to be completely free.

In Franzen’s latest, he challenges the notion of freedom upon which so many people believe their family’s life is based. The husband who is enslaved to his wife, the wife burdened by unhealthy relationships, the daughter who seeks space from the dysfunction of her family, and the son who yearns for freedom from his father’s ideals. In this enveloping novel, Franzen plays with the very idea of freedom through the example of the Berglund family and, hopefully, suggests to his many readers a more well-intentioned way of living a life more free.

After studying his Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel The Hours in college, there was no doubt in my mind that Michael Cunningham is one of the America’s most brilliant living writers. Seamlessly weaving Virginia Woolf’s life and fiction with a story of his own creating, Cunningham’s novel is an intelligent and unsentimental woman-focused piece. Even more remarkable to me was the fact that The Hours was written by a man.

Cunningham’s most recent novel, By Nightfall is another thoughtfully crafted novel that astutely examines modern life, art, and family. Despite the rather elite station in life of Cunningham’s characters, this story deals with fairly universal human themes, including our desire for greatness, our ambivalence towards mortality, and our desperate human need to demonstrate some semblance of permanence.

Peter and Rebecca Harris are middle-aged New Yorkers, he a mid-level art dealer, she editor of a struggling cultural magazine. With Peter as our guide, Cunningham explores art, the world in which it is bought and sold, the constant struggle to discover level of creative genius that man may be unable to create but not unable to imagine. While Peter vacillates over whether to sign a recently dealer-less sculptor generating much buzz in the art world, he finds himself contemplating the very way in which he conducts his business. In Peter’s search for beauty (which he ultimately defines as “a human bundle of accidental grace and doom and hope”), he worries that selling art to an ever-dwindling population of buyers may not be his truest calling. But were he to go against his core morals by signing a highly coveted artist producing transient but expensive work, Peter would be better able to finance his continuous search for creative genius.

Peter and Rebecca’s marriage doesn’t escape examination, especially when Rebecca’s charming but flighty brother Ethan (referred to as Mizzy, short for “The Mistake”) comes to visit after his one-month pilgrimage to a Japanese holy site. Mizzy occupies the Harris’ daughter Bea’s room, infringing upon the quiet routine of the empty nesters’ thin-walled apartment and placing a strain upon their marriage by means of his drug use. Meanwhile the Harris’s young twenty-something daughter lives in Boston, a college drop-out who ardently supports herself without parental support by tending bar at a hotel. Bea’s false memories of her parents’ ineptitude complicates her relationship with both Peter and Rebecca, but is most troublesome for her father. Marriage, love, and family are the source of many complications in Peter’s life, including an inconvenient attraction to drug-addicted Mizzy and his inability to fully recover from his homosexual brother Matthew’s death some twenty years past. While Peter admires the ability of great works of art to exist in perpetuity, he struggles to deal with mortality regarding the untimely death of Matthew, a man that was so full of promise and talent.

Cunningham’s commentary on modern life rung harshly true at times, for Peter was predictably surprised by the ordinariness of his life and the lives of his family. It was quite ironic that I read By Nightfall in large part on the same day that I went to see Judd Apatow’s latest film “This is 40.” I couldn’t help but be reminded of much of what I saw in Apatow’s movie, which deals with family struggles, purity in art, finding meaning in the temporary nature of life, and middle-age on a more common level, while reading Cunningham’s book. But maybe this isn’t a case of irony at all. Maybe the coincidence of these two pieces of art (because I consider film an art form, no matter what genre), addressing comparable themes through different mediums at a common point in time speaks to a widespread need for consideration of these topics. Whether you choose to explore them through Cunningham’s sinuous novel or through Apatow’s lengthy but rewarding film, is up to you (though I would recommend checking out both).

Francisco Goldman’s novel Say Her Name seems to be all the rage right now. I randomly came across a recommendation somewhere or other, and then proceeded to find brilliant reviews for the novel everywhere I looked on the internet. It wasn’t too long after I delved in that I figured out what all the fuss was about.

The narrative is reminiscent (to me at least) of that of Carolyn Parkhurst’s The Dogs of Babel. A man loses his wife and, while dealing with the tumultuous pain of his loss, he revisits (and maybe even romanticizes) the relationship they shared. The late wife in both cases is a bit more tortured than we first realize, but is always a compellingly vivacious character.

Goldman pulls us right into the throes of his sorrow as he reveals the tragic fact that his young wife, Aura, died in a drowning accident of some sort in her native country, Mexico. She was a graduate student at Columbia living with her husband in Brooklyn, and a vacation with friends took them down to Mexico. He recounts Aura’s lifestory in fairly chronological form up until her death. Throughout, he intersperses memories of his four years with Aura as well as the aftermath of her demise even though we remain fuzzy on the exact details of his wife’s last hours until the book’s last pages. This little structural detail really serves to keep you constantly feeling for Francisco; it is almost as though recounting Aura’s death is a truly insurmountable task, one that can only be completed once the other facts of their lives have been fully exhausted.

Intelligently written, Say Her Name is a beautiful manifestation of Francisco’s love for Aura as well as a tale of loss. Though the loss of his wife is the central thread of Goldman’s story, his all-encompassing awe for and devotion to Aura is what will most stain reader’s minds. Maybe it’s just because I’m a bit of a romantic and a huge sucker for stories told by the love-struck male who paints the object of his affection in the rosiest of love’s shades. Or maybe it’s because Goldman’s novel stands as one of the greatest acts of love that an individual could ever commit for someone else. Aura is immortalized in Say Her Name; her earliest dark adolescent thoughts, recorded in treasured diaries, the torturous secrets and insecurities shared with her husband, the gorgeous fragments of writing which she fervently dreamed of one day seeing bound in a published book are all threaded into this eulogy of a novel. We are introduced to Aura through Francisco’s narrative eyes, but a whole lot of authentic Aura finds its way into the story too.

Say Her Name has more depth than almost any other novel of love and loss I’ve yet come across. I’d attribute this both to Goldman’s intellectual roots but also to the fact that this story is so very steeped in his very real experience. Francisco documented his love for Aura the way he knew best. Though a novel alone cannot lessen the sorrow of losing one’s wife, writing such a strikingly real portrait of Aura allows her presence to permeate every corner of Goldman’s life. Though this in itself isn’t a major change from the way Francisco experinenced the initial shock of losing Aura, her spiritual presence begins to enhance and even brighten Francisco’s world, rather than fill him with an overwhelming degree of sorrow.

After Aura’s death, Francisco speaks with Ana Eva, a waitress at a restaurant the couple used to frequent. He shares with her a line from “Exequy on his Wife” a poem by Henry King, Bishop of Chichester that reads “ev’ry Howre a step towards thee.” For Francisco, this excerpt encompasses the whole state of emotions through which he is dealing. He goes on to explain that “this is why we need beauty, to illuminate even what has most broken us… [not] to help us transcend or transform it into something else, but first and foremost to help us see it.” This rationalization of beauty helps explain the importance of this particular piece of poetry to Francisco, but also is essential in gaining an understanding of why he wrote Say Her Name.

The novel is at times raw and painful, at others romanticized and lovely. But it is always undeniably real and authentic. Say Her Name is a harrowingly true story that touches at the heartstrings, for its profundity of love and depth of sadness are unquestionably, gut-wrenchingly sincere.

Sure, Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex was published back in the early 2000’s and won a Pulitzer in 2003. But this novel has stood up over the years and warrants reading and recommending again and again. From the time I first read it as a senior in high school to my most recent rereading this past month, the brilliance of Middlesex has not faded. I must also admit – I was surprised by how much of it I fully grasped during my younger years. But it was similarly delightful to recognize the seed of who I later became in my Middlesex-loving, 17 year old self. Brilliant though it may be, Middlesex is certainly not for everyone and I’m proud of my high school self for appreciating it so much.

During my later high school years, I was also on a huge Gabriel Garcia Marquez kick, which sheds some light on my obsession with Middlesex back in the day. Eugenides’ storytelling follows the Garcia Marquez vein with its multi-generational narrative and magical realist tone. The story is loosely narrated by Cal Stephanides, born Calliope and raised as a female until puberty hits (or rather, fails to hit as expected). Eugenides introduces us to three generations of Cal’s Greek-American family, tracing the lives of a people who carry a recessive biological anomaly which ultimately finds the light of day in Cal. Though this novel seems daunting (coming in at 529 pages), the sheer volume of life events covered in Middlesex keeps readers engaged throughout. Immigration, entrepreneurial endeavors, silkworms, incest, puberty, suburbia, white flight, genetics, and prohibition are just a sampling of the varied forces at work in Eugenides’ hefty volume. In taking a look back at the sum total of forces shaping Cal’s forebears, readers are able to more fully his life as lived, first under the guise of femininity and ultimately as a male.

Eugenides warms his readers up for the story of his protagonist’s remarkable biology by taking us back two generations to Mount Olympus where Cal’s grandparents Desdemona and Lefty Stephanides were raised. It’s almost as though Eugenides is testing the waters – if his readers can sit with the incestuous relationship between the earliest Stephanides, then they will surely welcome the Stephanides’ hermaphroditic grandchild into their hearts. And that is the beauty of this work – Eugenides’ characters are the types of people that most members of modern day society would deem freaks. Many of them engage in behavior that is entirely unfathomable to most upstanding citizens, if not considered downright disgusting. But he renders these individuals so endearing and tells their story in such an earnest way that we as readers are forced to suspend judgment. Three generations of the Eugenides family easily find their way into readers’ hearts in spite of their socially unacceptable flaws.

Middlesex isn’t necessarily a testament to transgender rights nor is it a meditation on the science of hermaphrodites. Though Cal’s sex and gender frame the story, they truly only figure into the last hundred or so pages. At its heart, Middlesex is the well-told tale of an immigrant family as experienced by one of the most misunderstood members of its youngest generation. It’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning piece of fiction that I’ve relished twice already in my life and anticipate rereading for years to come.

When a member of my book club first suggested Ready Player One as our read for the month of March, I didn’t have high hopes. The key words that I took from her brief description of the novel were “video games,” “science fiction,” and “fantasy.” I didn’t realize it until completing the book, but it’s author Ernest Cline was also the writer of the 2009 film Fanboys – a fact that would probably have further turned me off from this selection had I known it sooner. But I forced myself to give Ready Player One a shot since everyone else in my modest book club was so excited by the title. Meanwhile I worried that maybe I was in the wrong group of readers.

But from the first page, I was absolutely smitten with this book. Cline’s novel marked my first foray into sci-fi and, while I doubt many other science fiction novels are quite as enthralling and well-written as Ready Player One, this novel certainly challenged my preconceived notions of the genre.

Ready Player One launches from the death of James Halliday, creator of the virtual reality game OASIS which is as eponymous in the year 2044 as Google, Facebook, and Twitter are to internet users today. A bachelor billionaire at the time of his demise, Halliday erected an ironclad will which bestows his entire estate upon whichever OASIS-user wins the race to uncover Halliday’s “Easter egg” – videogame speak for a hidden key within a video game. The race to find Halliday’s egg, however, is more of a marathon than a sprint; despite the number of so-called “gunters” who make it their life’s purpose to locate the Easter egg, five years pass from the time of Halldiay’s death until someone discovers the first of three keys that must be collected in order to retrieve the egg.

And that lucky someone is our protagonist, orphaned 18-year-old Wade. Wade’s success in the hunt for the Easter egg is revealed in the prologue, and Cline’s decision to share the outcome of the quest so early in the novel actually proved to be a wise choice in my humble opinion. The ensuing story is a heart-stopping, anxiety-inducing, nail-bitting adventure. The knowledge that Wade succeeds in the end calmed my nerves while reading, but certainly didn’t reduce my sense of excitement while following his progress.

As Halliday was a child of the 1980’s, many of the quests relate to pop culture of the decade, a subject which devotees of the late tech genius study religiously. Wade’s deep knowledge of ancient gaming systems, obscure 80’s films like WarGames, rock music of the time from the likes of bands such as Rush, and Halliday’s personal life aid in his ultimate success as solving each puzzle requires expertise on these topics. Though my knowledge of the 80’s pop culture was much stronger than that of video game history, Cline’s story is highly readable to people of all familiarity levels because at it’s core, Ready Player One is an adventure, an underdog story, a quest involving the battle between good and evil.

And Wade is certainly not without a few evil foes. The initial five OASIS users to locate the first key are regular gunters, competitors who pose threats to one another in their search for the egg, but lack much power over one another outside their virtual reality quest. Soon after, countless employees of Innovative Online Industries (IOI), an internet service provider and communications firm, start racking up points on the scoreboard. Known as “Sixers” because of the six digits common to each of their avatar’s names, these corporate egg hunters are obligated to hand over Halliday’s estate, should they locate the egg and win the prize. In exchange, IOI pays them competitive salaries and takes care of their every need during the quest. The average gunter despises the Sixers – after all, they’re sell outs undermining the integrity of the whole contest. And if a Sixer wins the prize, many fear that IOI will commodify the currently-free OASIS, charging exorbitant fees and denying many users the essential opportunity to escape their real lives provided by the OASIS. Wade soon learns that the gunters are right to fear IOI, a conscienceless corporation willing to employ any measure necessary to win control of the OASIS.

The world of Ready Player One is futuristic, dystopian, and alarming enough to give anyone pause about how we let technology rule our lives with little care for the real world around us. Many of the themes explored in the novel raise questions regarding our reliance on the internet, virtual reality, and social media. The OASIS serves as a necessary refuge for many unfortunate people who seek an escape from the poverty, destruction, and hunger of the real world. It also serves highly practical functions, for instance as the site of virtual public schools. For those who are lonely and misunderstood, creating an OASIS avatar instills real world outcasts with a means of finding a place to belong. But fear of the catfish runs rampant – since OASIS users can design their avatars however they please, there is no reason to believe that the appearance, actions, or behavior of an avatar matches that of their real life person. Wade (whose avatar goes by the name Perzival) has a best friend in the virtual world, a fellow Halliday-devotee and gunter whose avatar is named Aech. Though competing in the search for Halliday’s egg does stress their friendship at times, Wade still considers Aech his best friend, despite never meeting nor knowing any personal real life details about him. Cline touches on this distinction between our virtual representations of self and our true selves as well as the danger in having only virtual, rather than real, connections with others.

This might sound like a complex and confusing novel, but Cline’s storytelling skills shine in Ready Player One. He sets the stage of this virtual reality-reliant society some thirty years in the future with ease and introduces elements of Wade’s world in such a way as to not overwhelm the reader. Even someone with zero tech knowledge, no background in science fiction, and little preexisting interest in the subject found Cline’s debut novel engrossing, completely unique, and remarkably easy to grasp.

I was telling my mother, also an avid reader, about the book, about how surprised I was to find myself enjoying it, about how widely appealing and palatable it could be. I guess I really sold her on it, because then she suggested reading Ready Player One with her own book club. While I don’t think many of middle-aged, suburban, ex-soccer moms who complain about reading books more than 250 pages long (and this one clocks in at 372) would take to this novel, I’m sure more than a few of them would be surprised to find that they rather enjoyed Ready Player One if they were willing to just give it a shot – I certainly did!

I was first drawn to Dean Bakopoulos’ second novel because of the title My American Unhappiness. This phrase sums up a lot of what I spend my time thinking about – how convenience, consumption, expansion, and similar American values deemed good by the population actually wreck havoc on our happiness and sense of content. I was pleasantly surprised by what I got out of this novel. A meditation on this unhappiness is definitely included, along with a bit of humor, some romance, and a touch of nostalgia. It’s a well-balanced novel that provides a bit of everything in a pleasing and enjoyable to read package.

Meet Zeke, the Executive Director of a Midwestern humanities nonprofit and the man behind “The Inventory of Unhappiness Project.” A widower following a short-lived and rather young marriage, Zeke is romantically uninvolved, though occupied with the unhappiness project and his beloved orphan nieces. The story unfolds appealingly with pieces of Zeke’s life being released bit by bit, making for a character that continues to grow on readers as the more appealing and endearing aspects of his personality are revealed. Though he ultimately makes some poor decisions in work and the romance department, at that point we’re already invested in this guy and rooting for him despite the odds.

So the unhappiness project. Funded by Zeke’s nonprofit, this inventory receives interviews, messages, and the like from citizens across the country who are asked one major question “Why are you so unhappy?” Zeke is intrigued by respondents’ willingness to share their discontent so readily with strangers, as well as the fact that so few respondents really deny the sad fact that they lead unhappy lives. Responses are littered throughout the novel and they ring with all the hollowness that comes from the consumer-driven, franchise-friendly state of our nation of lonely citizens. Zeke’s musings and reflections on life in America are honest and range from the heartfelt and nostalgic to the hopeless and dismal. I found his attitude toward President Bush (the novel is set in 2008) to be particularly spot on. He recognizes Bush as a leader estranged from and unable to help his people because of his failure to recognize and understand their unhappiness. He looks back at our nation’s finest leaders and identifies a common thread of darkness, melancholy, and depression, while Bush seems to sleep easy at night, out of touch with the problems pervading the nation under his leadership.

But apart from the political observations included, Zeke story includes his own share of family dramas, a quest to find love, and delusions of job security despite the fledgling economy and his secretary’s warnings. This novel packs a pretty mean punch, providing a little bit of something for everyone. It constantly entertains with its quirky characters, unpredictable scenarios, and of course those other situations that are inevitable to the reader, but rarely to Zeke himself. There’s plenty of levity within, but great depth can also be found, particularly in Zeke’s passion project, the Inventory of Unhappiness.

I finished this novel deeply satisfied. I was in the market for a book that would challenge me, make me think a little bit and maybe lend some insight to the state of American society, or at the very least to my own personal life. And it did just that, and then some. I was highly entertained as well as challenged; My American Unhappiness made me laugh just as much as it made me think of things in a new light. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and highly recommend it to anyone in the market for a good read. It’s the kind of novel that’s both satisfying as a beach read, but also stimulating enough for the non-vacation sect.

I consider myself a big Margaret Atwood fan, though I’ve only delved into a few of her novels. And I actually only first read The Handmaid’s Tale because it was assigned to me for a class (though I was delighted to find it already on my bookshelf, probably purchased for a few bucks at some used bookstore, and thus not one I needed to add to the list of textbooks to acquire). But it was a novel that really stuck with me, though whether because of its feminist undertones, its narrative style or Atwood’s particular voice, I can’t really say.

I guess the reason I can call Atwood a favorite is because I know she’s reliable. If I’m in a fictional funk, unable to pick up any novels that satisfy my craving for a good yarn, Atwood is one author whose work I know will fit the bill – and there’s a lot of it for me to choose from. That’s kind of what happened with The Robber Bride. I went to the library in search of a post-worthy read, a book that would be worth all the time and effort required to finish it, one that would just beg to be shared with the blogosphere and my small community of readers. I have a huge list of books to get to but I find that few are right at my fingertips at the local public library. Nine times out of ten, I have to put in a request and get it shipped from another branch before I can delve into its pages. So I decided to browse the aisles instead and see what was already right at my fingertips and ready to go home with me. Atwood was it.

The Robber Bride is the story of three women whose lives have been inextricably bound by a woman named Zenia. Tony, Charis and Roz all attended the same university, lived in the same dorm even, but barely knew one another until Zenia, their ruthless, mysterious and beautiful classmate, wreaked havoc in all their lives. Though the three suffered Zenia’s malice in entirely independent encounters, the recurring patterns of her behavior and the lasting heartbreak she sought solidified a friendship among these three women whose commonalities were few and far beyond Zenia.

Told in brilliant Atwood fashion, when The Robber Bride opens, Tony, Charis, and Roz are having lunch some five years after Zenia’s funeral. When they spot her across the restaurant, as alive as ever, we are taken back to the formative years of this dangerous woman’s relationship with her fellow co-eds in order to unearth the character of a woman who faked her own death.

Currently a history professor, Tony was a quiet undergrad who uncharacteristically took up a male friend’s offer to attend a party one night in the hopes that doing so would lead to the unfolding of a beautiful romance. Rather, it led her right to Zenia, and their brief but intense friendship was unlike anything reclusive Tony had known before. We are then taken back to Charis’ unstable youth, as she was juggled among female relatives against her will and fighting against a whole host of inner demons. After college, Zenia enters Charis’ life when the later becomes a yoga instructor and Zenia arrives to her class with a plea for help that the sympathetic gentle Charis cannot refuse. And finally we meet a young Roz, the mysteries of her father’s work, the pull to leave home, and the day when, in an effort to shower some due attention on his wife, Roz’s husband takes her to the restaurant where Zenia waitresses and the two women connect.

As in a mystery, Atwood doesn’t give her readers all they may want or need to know right away, but we earn more and more details as we bide our time. That very form was actually one of my favorite things in reading The Robber Bride; we learn about these three women leading quite disparate existences but who, nonetheless, share a deep and lasting bond because of one mysterious woman. It takes quite a lot of time to discover why Zenia played such a significant role for each of them, how she irrevocably changed the course of their lives, and how it ultimately brought them together. In form, the story unfolds quite realistically, for we are thrown into the present moment with little context, and only in patient time can we expect for the pieces to come together and the larger picture to find itself revealed.

Though a bit dark and brimming with mystery, deception, and heartbreak, The Robber Bride isn’t your categorical mystery novel, harlequin romance, or indulgent piece of chic lit. Intelligently told and wisely crafted, the book has all the hallmarks of a classic drama, a soap opera even, but dispensed in measured doses and veiled under cover of Atwood’s talent as an alluring wordsmith. Though it clocked in at a daunting 520 pages, the novel didn’t feel lengthy or drag on at any point, but rather, quickly progressed in the anachronistic telling of these four women’s stories.

No matter what sort of book you’re in the market for, drama, romance, mystery, or simply a well-weaved story, I highly recommend getting your hands on The Robber Bride. As expected, reviews are good all around and this complex novel is accessible and entertaining for any reader without dumbing itself down to the lowest appreciable level. Margaret Atwood’s authorial stamp on any piece of fiction is a high recommendation in itself but if you need further encouraging to pick this one up, take my word for it. You will be happy you did!