{"id":3143,"date":"2022-09-24T17:46:22","date_gmt":"2022-09-25T01:46:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=3143"},"modified":"2022-09-24T17:46:22","modified_gmt":"2022-09-25T01:46:22","slug":"review-cats-eye","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=3143","title":{"rendered":"Review: Cat&#8217;s Eye"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I love Margaret Atwood, partially because I read this book twenty years ago for the most Internet of reasons.  My roommate had a bunch of quotes from it rotating in his .sig file and they were all great.  I asked about it and he said it was good. So I read it.  I re-read it recently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;ve never read a bad Atwood book, but in may ways this is still my favorite.  I get the impression that most people think of her as the writer of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=656\"><em>A Handmaid&#8217;s Tale<\/em> <\/a>and think of her as exclusively writing books with a feminist message.  I think she&#8217;s certainly written works that suit that to a tee and that she&#8217;s always writing from a woman&#8217;s perspective.  Where I think <em>A Handmaid&#8217;s Tale<\/em> is focused on sounding an alarm, I think Cat&#8217;s Eye captures some of a life and the bruises one accumulates living it with compassion.  No call to action, except perhaps a little understanding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>My roommate told me that after reading <em>Cat&#8217;s Eye<\/em> he thought anyone could tell her the story of their childhood and she&#8217;d understand.  That&#8217;s probably the best review I&#8217;ve ever heard of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>She&#8217;s writing about are from growing up female in rural Canada in the 50&#8217;s, but I always related with it.  I understood this childhood, though I lived a different one.  There are details that people of that time probably find familiar, but that I never found off-putting. One determined to find a feminist message in here won&#8217;t have any trouble, but I think a reasonable reading sees much more.  No one here is exclusively a symbol.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And she&#8217;s Margaret Atwood.  Practically every third sentence would make you stop short and admire its perfection if it weren&#8217;t so much a part of a stream of language telling an immersive story.  A joy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A must.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I love Margaret Atwood, partially because I read this book twenty years ago for the most Internet of reasons. My roommate had a bunch of quotes from it rotating in his .sig file and they were all great. I asked about it and he said it was good. So I read it. I re-read it [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3143"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3143\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3147,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3143\/revisions\/3147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}