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A review by luxxybee97
Dancing Girls and Other Stories by Margaret Atwood
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
4 stars
tl;dr – I’d love to have a drink with Louise tbh she sounds like a barrel of laughs
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Margaret Atwood is such a captivating writer. I literally say it in every single review, I know, but she genuinely hooks me in a way that no other writer does. The more I read of her, the more I’m fascinated by how easily, how deftly, she transforms ordinary and everyday life into something else. I also feel like I say this in every review, but it does bear repeating because every time, it blows my mind. Like how does she see the world like that! Where does it come from! And it’s even more impressive because she’s writing short stories that basically tell the same stories again and again, just from different angles, places, perspectives, yet it never feels like she’s rehashing the same ideas over and over again. Does that make sense, or, like so many of her characters, is it a complete contradiction? Perhaps it’s both, which I think is fine. Nothing about human beings really makes sense anyway.
Can I pick out one story in particular? Not hugely, although I liked Training’s weird schaden-Freudian, neurotic self-loathing, and I thought Giving Birth was a delightfully meta note on which to end the collection. Atwood’s characters are never shy of psychological drama, whether they acknowledge it or not, and even if she weren’t as half a good a technical writer as she is, her understanding of relationships and how people slide imperfectly together is honestly one of the keenest I think I’ve ever seen from any author. Often, it does feel like her stories are more meditations than actually anything ‘happening’ – no one writes women sitting around and remembering things like her, after all – though it can sometimes be…hard, I guess, to pinpoint exactly what the message of some of the stories are, apart from just general observations on relationships. But hey, even if I don’t always get it on the first try, like I say, it’s always a pleasure to read.