Review: "The Heart Goes Last" by Margaret Atwood

WARNING: This review contains mild spoilers.

RATING 2/5

"The Heart Goes Last" was the first book I've read that was written by Margaret Atwood. I've heard countless exciting stories about her writings, so I really looked forward to finally reading a novel written by her. However, throughout the story I got more and more discouraged to finish the novel. After a while I decided to give the book another shot and I finished it. I've never regretted something more in my entire book-reading life.

The beginning of the story is what attracted me to the book at first. It's about a young, urban couple forced to live in their car due to the economic collapse. Then they get an opportunity of a lifetime to live in the gated community of Consilience, where they will get jobs, enough food and a home for six months of the year. The other six months they have to serve as inmates in the Positron prison. This storyline definitely has some good potential for an entertaining novel, but unfortunately Atwood realized the opposite. There were too many plot twists and countless dark turns in the story. In the beginning it didn't bother me, but after a while it got old.

The end of the story was a catastrophe. It almost feels like the ending was the ending of a whole other story than the one I was reading. Sex played a much bigger role than I originally expected. Not just 'regular' sex, but also sex with random objects and animals. This made the story a lot weaker and I didn't enjoy reading these events.

On the positive side, I really enjoyed Atwood's writing style. Her choice of words didn't contain difficult words, which makes it easy to read and understand the story fast. The story has chapters within chapters. A 'big' chapter usually contains around 25 pages, whilst a 'small' chapter only has approximately 3 or 4 pages. I noticed this helped me reading the book faster.

Even though my first experience with Margaret Atwood's novels

wasn't a big succes, I plan on reading "The Haindmaid's Tale" in a few weeks. This is because I hear that is her best novel, and I want to find out if she truly is the great author that everyone claims she is. I do hope that sex with animals is excluded in that one.