Image from Literary Quicksand

One of the most fascinating character studies I’ve come across, for both of the MCs, Grace Marks, serving a life prison term for murder, and Dr. Jordan, the psychiatrist who has come to town to study her. For each of them, Atwood weaves an incremental web of origins and then applies its affects to their present actions. For students of mental illness you will be more intrigued than the non-students of the readers, but that isn’t to say non-students won’t be greatly compelled to keep reading, to find out the “truth,” which isn’t easy to tease out.

There is so much in Grace’s story that women of any age will be able to relate to. I daresay that there is much in Dr. Jordan’s that men of any age will be able to relate to.

Atwood does an excellent job of world-building for the time and location it’s is set in, 1800s in Toronto, Canada, and nearby areas, from the streets to the buildings to the clothes to industries and social structures. Early in the book, her description of Grace and her family traveling across the ocean from Ireland to Canada, is vivid and haunting. For anyone who has had an ancestor emigrate from their homeland in dire circumstances, before and during tough journeys, you may get triggered in reading it.

Atwood also does a good job in detailing life in an 1800s prison, asylum, the life of a servant in a fancy house, and how fortunes can take a turn.

Reading Alias Grace was a commitment to narrative. I will carry Grace Marks with me now.

P.S.  I saw the movie adapted to the screen awhile back, but it was only while reading the book that the details started to come back to me.  The film is available on Netflix and I plan on watching it again.  As is usually the case, movies cannot compete with books because of the meticulous details that are embedded within them.