tasharobinson 's review for:

Life Before Man by Margaret Atwood

2.0

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I keep reading early Margaret Atwood thinking it'll be as good as mid-to-late-career Margaret Atwood, and I keep being disappointed. I expect I'll learn, about the time I run out of early Margaret Atwood books. I'm pretty sure she isn't going to write any more books in the 1970s. This one had the same problems I've had with the other ones — plotlessness, shapelessness, a collection of characters with few redeeming facets, only one of them with any spine or sense of purpose. As a study in passivity and frustration, this book works fine, but I feel as aimless and weak as the protagonists for having doggedly finished it.