Margaret Atwood occupies a strange nook in my heart. She's become a bit of a chore lately, as I'm including her in my senior honors thesis; on the other hand, I've now read almost all of her novels, and while none are bad or even...not really good. Just that because a few of the novels shine so brightly, that the others seem duller in comparison.

Well, Alias Grace is a supernova. It's an absolutely phenomenal novel, and a truly thrilling read. It's a departure for Atwood, as it's historical fiction (of course, she did do the Journals of Susanna Moodie before), but moreover, it employs similar narrative techniques as detective fiction, while turning them on their head--in any case, it's definitely a page-turner, which is not something you usually mention in conjunction with Atwood. This doesn't discount the literary merit--there's enough meat in the book to write a dissertation or five on it. There's something quite fresh in her style here, with many many passages I absolutely had to read aloud to whomever was (un)fortunate enough to be near me as I read.

The general structure of the novel is from the outset quite fascinating--each section is tied under the flag of a quilt pattern, and each begins with a series of epigraphs, combining historical documents, poetry, "witness accounts" and so forth--ultimately questioning the validity of each, and how we reconfigure the past with necessarily limited frameworks at hand. Writing a fictionalized account of a historical person is itself an indictment of history, but Atwood takes it so much farther, and in much more wonderfully 'political' ways. Grace is still a frustrating enigma by the end of the text, but you'll adore her and her sly moves, her secret longings, and her storytelling ability--Dr. Jordan, as we discover, has no idea what he's getting into with her. It's certainly a dark read, and often I would have to lay the book down for at least a minute or two to catch my breath. But Atwood has a wonderful way of infusing humor into even the bleakest of moments, so there were just as many times when I found myself laughing aloud. This book will not leave you for a long time.