The Robber Bride

Title: The Robber Bride

Author: Margaret Atwood

Number of pages: 564

Started: 27 July 2009

Finished: 7 August 2009

Opening words:

The story of Zenia ought to begin when Zenia began. It must have been someplace long ago and distant in space, thinks Tony; someplace bruised, and very tangled. A European print, hand-tinted, ochre-coloured, with dusty sunlight and a lot of bushes in it- bushes with thick leaves and ancient twisted roots, behind which, out of sight in the undergrowth and hinted at only by a boot protruding, or a slack hand, something ordinary but horrifying is taking place.

Plot summary:

Zenia is beautiful, smart and greedy, and by turns manipulative and vulnerable, needy and ruthless. She is also dead. Just to make sure, Tony, Roz and Charis are at the funeral. But five years on, the unthinkable happens - Zenia is back.

What I thought:

This was a Margaret Atwood book that I actually liked the whole way through. It is the tale of a woman who her friends thought had died, much to their relief her having wreaked havoc in each of their lives, and yet one day she reappears. The books tells the tale of this woman, Zenia, and gradually the story of her somewhat devilish impact on the lives of others comes to the surface.

I think I preferred this to a lot of Atwood’s other books because it stayed grounded in reality and I also liked seeing the pieces of the jigsaw coming together to explain how a deceased woman could in fact still be alive and why this was such alarming news to those she had left behind. A good read.