The Robber Bride

Margaret Atwood

Dec 2010 · Emblem Editions

About this ebook

This is the wise, unsettling, drastic story of three women whose lives share a common wound: Zenia, a woman they first met as university students in the sixties. Zenia is smart and beautiful, by turns manipulative, vulnerable – and irresistible. She has entered into their separate lives to ensnare their sympathy, betray their trust, and exploit their weaknesses. Now Zenia, thought dead, has suddenly reappeared. In this richly layered narrative, Atwood skilfully evokes the decades of the past as she retraces three women’s lives, until we are back in the present – where it’s yet to be discovered whether Zenia’s “pure, free-wheeling malevolence” can still wreak havoc. The Robber Bride reports from the farthest reaches of the sex wars and is one of Margaret Atwood’s most intricate and subversive novels yet.

Ratings and reviews

It's been a couple of months now since I finished reading it so I probably won't be able to remember everything but I'll give it a go. I thought this book was really good and it makes me want to read more Margaret Atwood. Her descriptive passages are beautiful at times and the dialogue is natural but I think her strength is in her characters. She writes really strong, individual and believable characters with very detailed back histories. Or at least, her women characters are. The male characters, apart from one token gay character, are shallow, one dimensional stereotypes. It would be easy to write it off as male hating feminist literature but I think they have been deliberately created like this to exaggerate the weaker characteristics of the three main female characters. Even though they are very well written and mostly sympathetic they are frustratingly weak where their men are concerned. This weakness is also evident in how they react to and deal with Zenia.Zenia is a really destructive character and I was always wondering what is her motivation, what is her purpose? It's only by the end of the novel that I realised that despite the whole thing being about her, it isn't really about her. The novel is about the three protagonists and Zenia too is just another narrative tool like the male characters, and this is why, despite more apparent depth to her character she is in fact as one dimensional as the men. Unfortunately, that's all I can remember of my observations though I'm sure I had more to say. If more comes to me I'll return.

About the author

Margaret Atwood is the author of over twenty-five books, including fiction, poetry, and essays. Among her most recent works are the bestselling novels Cat's Eye and The Robber Bride, and the collections Wilderness Tips and Good Bones and Simple Murders. She lives in Toronto.