A review by savaging
Bluebeard's Egg by Margaret Atwood

5.0

The edition I read somehow has on its cover a terrible shiny-blond white-waif woman draped in gold-enameled silk and Anthropologie-style accessories, surrounded by Kincaidesque flowers in cool-color palette. In addition to making me mildly ashamed to read it in public, fearing I'll be pegged as a reader of panting maidens whose lower lips tremble when thick-necked knights off the dragon, the image is the very opposite of the content of the book. Seriously: put anything else there. A worn couch; a beetle larvae; animal droppings -- any image chosen at random would better reflect what's happening inside these pages.

Because nothing is rarified or prettified here. These are stories of normal people in a normal earth that is also deep and rich and wide and wild. Like this, from "In Search of the Rattlesnake Plantain":

The woods are open, the ground covered with a mat of leaves, dry on the top, pressed down into a damp substratum beneath, threaded through (I know, though I don’t look, I have looked before, I have a history of looking) with filaments, strands, roots, and skeins of leaf mould laid through it like fuses, branched like the spreading arteries of watercolour blue in certain kinds of cheese.

I especially loved the stories of parents, though Atwood's wicked wit parsing out patriarchy in romantic relationships is also a treat. And "The Salt Garden," about love and family in the nuclear age was astonishing.