Tag Archives: margaret atwood

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Little Girls Are Life Sized

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Cat's Eye
Margaret Atwood
Literary Fiction
McClelland & Stewart
September 1988

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

I have never understood the tendency for some older people to view childhood as an easy time, free of care and responsibility. Sure, you don’t have to pay the bills, but you get no choices on where you live, what you eat, and you are forced to go to school. I was a little girl and little girls can have the capacity and the opportunity to be utterly horrendous to each other, as they frequently are.

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Close Your Eyes, Pay the Price for Your Paradise

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The Heart Goes Last
Margaret Atwood
Bloomsbury
24 September 2015
hardcover

the_heart_goes_lastMargaret Atwood’s latest novel is an incisive critique of our current society.  Neoliberalism and the prison industrial complex, as well as nostalgia for a non-existent, rosy mid-20th century, all cop a wry humoured nudging.  Not a bashing; Atwood would never be so unsubtle.

Charmaine and Stan are at their wits’ end.  Struggling to get by in the depths of an economic depression and a society barely holding itself together, they live in their car and can see no way out of their deepening poverty.  Fortunately, they are eligible to participate in a well funded social experiment, the Positron Project.  They will be provided with a house, with employment, and with the safety of a gated community, in return for spending every second month as prisoners in the Positron Prison. Continue reading

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      IN FLANDERS FIELDS Norman Jorgensen, illustrated by Brian Harrison-Lever Fremantle Press, 2004 A cold morning light breaks over the muddy expanse. A deathly silence reigns but the sounds of battle linger in the ears of battle-scarred—battle-scared—men huddled around a small cheering fire in the trenches, opening their Christmas mail. Letters and … Continue reading