Review: The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood

The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I am so uncomfortable with the idea of rating an Atwood book 2 stars but I feel like I have to given my experience with this novel. I typically love Atwood's novels - but this just didn't live up to my expectations. The premise is good - I love how Atwood views dystopian situations and I think this particular premise had a great deal of promise. And the book began quite well - I was engaged, interested and it was very readable. But, at a certain point, the novel went off the rails and just never made it back for me. It went from promising to completely bizarre and just didn't recover. I only kept reading because I was convinced that Atwood would take all of this oddness to a place that would redeem the entire work. Unfortunately, that didn't happen for me. It fell flat over and over. The plot moved quickly into ridiculous, the characters were odd (and not in a good way), the premise went to bizarre-land and never veered back and the tropes felt insanely familiar (perhaps recycled?).

I really hate having to rate this so low but I can't help it. I didn't connect with this novel and I think this may well be the worst Atwood I've ever read. If I were you, I'd stick to her earlier work (specifically - The Handmaid's Tale and the MaddAddamm series beginning with Oryx and Crake). She can be entirely genius but I just didn't find that to be the case with this novel.

NOTE: Received this e-galley in exchange for an honest review.