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3.65 AVERAGE
3.65 AVERAGE
As other early works by Margaret Atwood, this novel has a female leading character and includes some of the themes such as patriarchy, self-exploration and search for women's identity, the role of writing, relationship with female body, romantic relationships that are recurrent in Margaret Atwood's works. The main character lives her life far away from authenticity but constantly telling lies to picture herself, past and present to meet what are supposedly society's expectations and particularly those of men. The plot follows her path to self-destruction. This said I found the story just boring and not very engaging. We don't follow any path of growth from the main character so it was quite disappointing in the end.
Just finished a reread after close to 30 years. I still found it very funny, but back then I loved it, and now I think she's written some that are better. I dropped my rating from 5 stars to 4.25.
dark
mysterious
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Not my all-time favorite Atwood, but pretty darn good.
Permission to burrow deep into the messy, chaotic, wonderful lives of other people is one of the big magics of great stories. This isn’t escape exactly because their lives are often more chaotic, messy and dangerous than our own, and yet, at the end we wake up feeling as if we have been given the gift of a second, third or fourth life.
Lady Oracle is such a story. Atwood gives a loose, jangling coming of age story in which the narrator, Joan, learns the tightrope walk of expectations from her overbearing mother, her aloof father, her mercurial husband and mass culture at large.
Joan is at constant war with her own body and struggles to own her creative gifts. There’s schoolyard bullying, lurking perverts, gothic romance, political satire and, nearly, a minor act of international terrorism.
I fell in love with Joan, just a little, which maybe tells you more about me than the story. Lady Oracle is a robust, funny story bursting with the vibrant wordplay for which Atwood is known.
Read it. You may fall in love with Joan as well.
Lady Oracle is such a story. Atwood gives a loose, jangling coming of age story in which the narrator, Joan, learns the tightrope walk of expectations from her overbearing mother, her aloof father, her mercurial husband and mass culture at large.
Joan is at constant war with her own body and struggles to own her creative gifts. There’s schoolyard bullying, lurking perverts, gothic romance, political satire and, nearly, a minor act of international terrorism.
I fell in love with Joan, just a little, which maybe tells you more about me than the story. Lady Oracle is a robust, funny story bursting with the vibrant wordplay for which Atwood is known.
Read it. You may fall in love with Joan as well.
For the last twelve years I have sought to recreate the high of reading [b:The Handmaid’s Tale|38447|The Handmaid’s Tale (The Handmaid's Tale, #1)|Margaret Atwood|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1578028274l/38447._SY75_.jpg|1119185] through the author's other works. After this latest stint, I'm officially calling it quits. It's not the first time I've read something so inexorably 'white woman' and felt as if I were regressing, but there was just something about this that especially rubbed me wrong at every turn. The maybe/maybe not fatphobia and denigration of romance literature, the mewling on and on about revolutionary work that came straight out of Dostoevsky's [b:Demons|5695|Demons|Fyodor Dostoevsky|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1524586008l/5695._SY75_.jpg|1487216], the narrator dismissal of the idea that folks would try to kill themselves by throwing themselves down the stairs after a coworker of mine succeeded in doing that three months ago: if an angel came down and told me that this book coming into my life when it did was part of some midlife crisis cosmic prank, I would've believed it. And look, I know how ridiculously dramatic the whole tone of this review is (a not infrequent quality to my writings to be honest), but part of it is facts and part of it is trying to make up for how the whole book felt like an exercise in edging, where every time a scenario/character/theme threatened to consolidate into something serious was met by another pathetic pratfall. The point? The point. The point is that this book bored me to tears with its vacuous self absorption and repetitive white suburbanalities, and while I would've preferred to figure this out twelve years or even nine when my last Atwood was, that's the inconvenience of personal growth for you.
I guai della troppa fantasia, di un eccesso di romanticismo, della incapacità di dire di no, in un comicissimo crescendo di equivoci, identità inventate, rimedi peggiori dei mali, il tutto narrato da una scrittrice di romanzi gotici che crede di essere la protagonista di quello che scrive.
Un romanzo esilarante e pirotecnico, un vero prezzo di bravura. Ma si sa, la Atwood è una garanzia.
Un romanzo esilarante e pirotecnico, un vero prezzo di bravura. Ma si sa, la Atwood è una garanzia.
mysterious
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I love Margaret Atwood but this is not one of her best. Of course, it's one of her earliest and writers always grow the more they write. this one was just odd and felt more like work to read than enjoyment. I rarely have this experience with Atwood.