Margaret Atwood. Good Bones and Simple Murders (1994)

Margaret Atwood Good Bones and Simple Murders (1994) A nicely made little book of some of Atwood’s shards and fragments: variations on fairy tales, meditations, dialogues between unnamed characters, micro-tales, and so on. Atwood is very clever, every one of these bits succeeds. A pleasure to read. I liked The Little Red Hen Tells All, for example, which gives us a reversal of the usual plot. These items are clearly experiments of one kind or another, playful rewritings, games played with current themes and topics, but each shows us a powerful imagination, a clear-eyed wit, and, despite what that wit observes, a merry heart. ***