A review by emilynohablaespanol
The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood

3.0

Zenia is a ghost. A ghost armed with teeth and tits and a makeup bag full of tricks that will make you lock your men up in high towers lest they be lured away, to sea, to prison, to a living death. For twenty years she has haunted Tony, Charis, and Roz, three college dorm mates whose Zenia-based traumas bring them closer together. The first time they bury her, as The Robber Bride opens, they rejoice uneasily. Ghosts never go down without a fight, and Zenia proves no exception. So, when they see her again, they finally get a chance at revenge… or if not revenge, then peace, at last.

I always find myself picking up prominent female authors with their least-known or least-liked works, but I liked this one. The Robber Bride feels like a melodrama, based on the character Zenia alone, but reality bursts back in with the other women, who stand in such bright contrast to one another that they become realistic individuals. Of course, when we learn their backstories, we are submerged back into the world of heightened emotion and extreme human behaviors (though, and as the narrator likes to remind us throughout, these are war babies and the reality these women grew up with, all the way through the book’s present in 1991, are the consequences of war), but then Atwood manages to sketch real women through depictions of their pain.

I mean, I hate to say it, because people are so diverse and surprising, but drawing on this book as a writing lesson, it seems like what builds character is pain — where it comes from, how it was dealt with, and how trauma is remembered.

Thematically, the characters mirror each other, which is tough to do with three characters, I think. Mirrors usually only have two sides, the world in which it is viewed and that world’s reflection. Still, there’s something about Tony, Charis, and Roz that intersects and makes their relationship feel destined. Tony, for example, grows up as a left-handed person in a right-handed world, forced to use her right hand, The Right hand. As a result, she becomes convinced that she herself is “left,” a person spelled backwards, wrong and somehow incomplete. Charis, Tony’s reflection, sees herself as similarly broken, split in half around her trauma, during which the girl Karen becomes her light twin, the woman Charis. Meanwhile, Charis’s spiritual twinness is represented by Roz’s real twin daughters, who speak and often act as one, an entity which they call “Erla.” (I know I gave Roz a shallow reading, but as she is the more ground, materialistic of the three, Roz doesn't seem to have "twinness" anywhere else in her life.)

The Robber Bride is the kind of book you have to read over a few days with a notebook beside you, to fully enjoy the depth that has gone into creating these women. For that reason, it’ll probably get better with rereads.

Actual rating is closer to 4 stars, but because I can't really remember details or standout moments a mere 24 hours later, I'm marking it with 3. (As always, I'm rating my experience reading the book, not the actual book. I truly believe it deserves more attention than I'm willing to give it right now, but I will come back.)