PLOT SPOIL!
Being a psychiatric nurse, there are, in this book, clever insights on how to best treat those described as mentally ill. Lock ‘em up and throw away the key. A common approach even up to the 1950's/60's in Canada.

However, from earliest times - there have always been those willing to listen to 'patients' or 'inmates' as if part of them is in someway still intact. A willingness to treat a caged person as a human being with certain rights. For those who know Eric Berne's book - I am O.K You’re O.K. (The title sums up the entire book!) there is in Grace, a real opportunity to see this from the receiving persons point of view. Believe in her or not - you sense as Grace reaches out in her timid ways, either physically (touching soft linen or pretty clothes) or emotionally, and spiritually to get a little love or comfort in her life that she is being treated best when this I am okay / you ‘re okay approach is used.

My biggest enjoyment from the book was it’s thriller like quality of a-who-dunit as we, as readers, are invited to weigh the scales of justice looking into the issue of her guilt

As a man I cannot help thinking Atwood gives a good account of what it must be like to be a female. I don’t believe in reincarnation but if I did I can see some possible advantages! There is a sensitivity inside this women that few men I know, seem to have within them. You can get very deep glimpses of it from female writers such as Emily Bronte but Atwood has added an interesting heroine if that what she be.

I adored the misunderstanding surrounding the fruit – the best.

It gives you a real sense of the weight of time that hangs on such inmates - of what it must be like to have to spend so much of your best years incarcerated in darkness. Perhaps this quote might meet with Atwood’s approval.

plodded through the shadows fruitlessly like an ubiquitous spook" (Joseph Heller).

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