Like with any well-written book, I notice new things every time I reread a Margaret Atwood novel. This time, I was struck by the way things happened in threes: the deaths of three mother figures, three iconic sheets, three dresses, three "suitors" at the farm, three sides to Grace's personality. Is it confirmation bias? Or is Atwood playing around with a number that has a lot of literary and pseudomystical background?

Anyway, this book is great in that it has several levels of narrative - the straightforward historical fiction story, the commentary on storytelling, the seldom-told plight of women and immigrants and the poor, the ruminations on the nature of identity, etc. I'm convinced that Margaret Atwood couldn't write a bad novel if she tried.