Alias Grace

So, Margaret Atwood. I may have mentioned before that she is a great author. Recently series producers have also discovered this, so The Handmaid's Tale is now a famous thing. Which is good. I loved that novel, and I like the series too, now that it's drifted away from the plot of the novel a bit. It is a universe that can stand on its own. Also, she is apparently publishing a sequel, The Testaments, later this year.
Another of her novels that made it to the screen is Alias Grace. Now I haven't seen the series, but the novel has been on my bookshelf for quite a while, and I decided this was the time to read it. I knew nothing about it beforehand, except that it was about a murder case from the 1840, in which Grace Marks was convicted for killing her employer and fellow maid at the age of 15. She was not executed, but remained imprisoned for most of her life.
Without going into too much detail about the plot; I loved this novel. It is typical Atwood; we have a smart, independent female protagonist who finds her way in the world. She talks about herself and her history in such a way that you can never be fully sure that she is telling the truth, or even that she knows what the truth actually is. She has her flaws, but that makes her human.
The other characters in the novel are not as fleshed-out. I thought Simon Jones would become another conflicted, complex character he turned out to be quite conventional and predictable. But the novel is about Grace, and she is engaging, the story is engaging, nothing much happens and still you keep on wanting to read more. Everything that annoyed me about The Heart goes Last was done right here. Also, the novel contains poems, witness accounts, all kinds of other materials that give it substance and context.
In the end, Atwood let's us decide for ourselves whether Grace actually committed the murders. The historical accounts don't fully convince either way, and I feel she fictionalised them very neutrally. At 500+ pages it is a pretty heavy tome, which is one of the few downsides. It took me a while to get through this novel, not because it was difficult, but because it was a lot to take in.
Next up in Atwood land are more of her earlier novels, since I somehow seem to be working backwards through her works. I hope they are just as good, and maybe a little bit thinner!