A review by jedore
Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood

challenging dark sad tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

“Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.”

Apparently I read this book a couple decades ago, but it was all new to me this time around. 

Having been the victim of various degrees of bullying from the first day of 4th through the beginning of 9th grade, I thought I would connect deeply with this book. I totally related to much of what Elaine (coincidentally my middle name) went through…though it was quite a bit harsher and more focused than my experience. We even shared the experience of one of the bullies’ parents being a POS and a mother who knew it was happening, but did nothing to stop it. But Atwood lost me at the point Elaine’s abuse ended, which was quite a large portion of the book.

Maybe it’s because I’m such a sensitive soul, but being bullied totally wrecked me for the first three decades of my life. I was so terrified of females that I steered clear of them until my thirties. I thought it was totally unbelievable that Atwood had Elaine reunite with her primary abuser in high school and remain best friends for several more years, seemingly without any repercussions. Once I escaped my bullies (also in early high school), I would NEVER, EVER have returned! I also found it unrealistic that Elaine joined women’s groups in early adulthood. It was disappointing that Atwood didn’t dive deeper into Elaine’s damage and true feelings toward women. I also became hyper-focused on males because they didn’t play the mind games and treated me so much better (albeit that was always because they wanted something from me, which was also damaging in a different way). While on several occasions Elaine mentioned her preference of males, it didn’t go deep enough given the severity of her abuse at the hands of females. 

To this day, as a result of being bullied as a young girl and a consistent flow of baffling situations and/or minor to moderate bullying by grown women, I’m in a strange place with women…I absolutely love and support them from afar, but I can only claim one deeply loving and mutually supportive female non-familial relationship. I’ve accepted that it must not be meant to be in this lifetime. 

So, overall, the book missed the mark for me, which was disappointing considering the massive potential the story held for me. I may be wrong, but my hypothesis is that Atwood didn’t actually live what she wrote about in this book, she just believed herself capable of writing about it.