queenclio's reviews
246 reviews

Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood

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3.0

I identify as a Margaret Atwood fan and have taken to collecting her books for future reading, so I jumped at the chance to read this for my book club. What I love about Atwood is her writing style. The woman consistently writes beautiful sentence after beautiful sentence. When it comes to Cat's Eye, her prose was top-notch, as usual, and her morbid sense of humor and even love for all things science were clearly present. But the story itself dragged on far too long and lacked the cohesion I wanted as a reader.

The story follows Elaine, a 60ish year-old painter who's back in her hometown of Toronto for a retrospective of her career's work. I felt that Atwood wanted to take us on a journey of Elaine's life so we could understand the contents of her retrospective, the details that so many of her paintings portray, which to the naked, uninformed eye, would be nonsense or otherwise unknowable. There is plenty to be said about childhood trauma and the ways in which young girls conduct their friendships, and how they affect their lives perpetually as they grow up, but in the end, Atwood focused her lens too closely in some instances, and not closely enough on others.