Well, if you told me you had a Margaret Atwood book about paleontologists falling in love, I would tell you you had my new favorite book. But apparently, it was not to be. The difference between this book and Atwood's later works is vast - this is redundant, with shallow characters and a flimsy plot. And the dinosaurs are shoehorned into a kind of annoying allegory ( )

Atwood's first book. boring ( )

Margaret Atwood pulls apart the threads of family and relationship like no other. This novel is told from three perspectives: Elizabeth's, Nate's, and Lesje's. Elizabeth and Nate are married, though Elizabeth's lover Chris has just committed suicide. Elizabeth and Lesje work together at a museum. Nate becomes entranced by Lesje and tries to enter her life. The lives of the three become entangled in interesting ways, as they try to work out what they each want.

This is the first of Atwood's 1970s work I've read, and I enjoyed it. Obviously, infidelity and adults behaving badly is not pleasant subject material, but Atwood makes her novel compulsively readable with a narrative structure that has you reading each perspective with alternating sympathy and repulsion. ( )

Found this one to be rather slow going. The setting was comfortably familiar - the ROM, the Planetarium, Murray's and Fran's are all places that I visited in the 1970s. The way in which the three characters matured and changed during the year of the story was interesting and I did want to find out what finally happened to the three of them. The ending was quite abrupt. ( )

Another good Atwood. ( )