Good Bones

If you're looking for 'normal' short stories, this collection isn't it. Some are like dreams, others a stream of thought. All are deeper than their brevity suggests, thought provoking and surprising. A masterpiece in showing the larger story through inference.

A selection of short stories, most of them very short. Some of them are in conjoined sets, so you'll have several on a common theme that are read in order. But don't let length put you off, some of the are delightful. The sets wjhere she takes delight in skewering fairy tales, or telling classic stories from a different perspective are worth the rest of the book alone. The one taking the voice of Hamlet's mother, Gertrude, is just fantastically twisted in conception.
Some of them just didn;t do it for me, but the gems are there and deserve to be picked out.

A collection of short pieces which are dry, ironic, strange. Various topics, including Queen Gertrude in Hamlet addressing her son, or the viewpoint of the little red hen, which seems to be from a children's story I'm not familiar with, but all have a common thread of examining misogyny and the roles played by women and men. Well-written and clever, sad, dark in places.

In University, I had the opportunity to pick up some of Margaret Atwood's books - mostly the inter-texts of fairy tales! I fell in love with her writing, and soon after I was binging The Handmaid's Tale and it's sequel. I accidentally stumbled upon this book as a charity book sale and I jumped at the chance to read it. Why wouldn't I? Margaret Atwood is a LEGEND. And after a little bit of research, I found there were more inter-texts hiding in this book too.

This series of short stories is a great read if you want some compelling and intriguing stories by a writer who is the master of the art. The different point of views of fairy tales really got me, and I had to reread some of the stories (alongside reading some other amazing reviews show more and takes on the book) to get a good grasp on what was going on. I seriously loved deep diving in this book.

I highly recommend it and I definitely am going to be picking up more books by this legend. Her writing is wickedly smart and she sees stories in such a mind boggling way.

Three out of five stars. show less

This is a collection of very short fiction by Margaret Atwood. It is mostly a collection centered on ideas rather than on characters. Ms. Atwood re-tells fairy tales and other stories from the perspective of a single character, explores the portrayal of women in stories and talks about how to make a man. Great fun. Light read, but thought-provoking...the kind of thing that will play around in your mind after you've read it.

This is an eclectic collection of short pieces (a little too short and non-narrative to be called short stories) on topics such as Chicken Little, the importance of dumb women in literature, Hamlet from Gertrude's perspectives, war, death, birth and more. There is no doubting, reading this, that Atwood has a feminist bent, but don't let that you scare you off - it is definitely not a ram-down-your-throat version of feminism. Rather, it is a funny, smart and insightful perspective.
I would not recommend this as an introduction to Atwood - a first time reader would probably be better suited to reading one of her novels such as The Blind Assassin or The Handmaid's Tale first. But I think that for readers that have encountered Atwood before, show more this collection will give you an insight into a fascinating and wryly humourous writer. show less

From retelling of fairy tales to hard-hitting, modern fiction, Atwood is inventive, courageous, and experimental throughout this collection. I found it to be . a quick read because it was so good that I couldn't put it down. Short story collections are usually pretty uneven, but I found few clunkers in this collection. It was very good.