There are twelve wonderful stories in this book, most of them based on the themes of feminism and personal change.
1. Significant Moments in the Life of my Mother: The flash-back reminiscence of a young girl of her mother in Nova Scotia. While she talks about her mother, the young girl reveals and finds out a lot about herself.
2. Hurricane Hazel:
Another flashback about a boyfriend during teenage years after World War I in Toronto. Self-conscious adolescence aptly portrayed.
3. Loulou: or, The Domestic Life of the Language:
Loulou, an eccentric potter living with her third husband, shares her house with poets who impose on her without taking her into their circle. She finds out that an accountant she met is not what she thought he was. He is just like the other men.
4. Uglypuss:
Joel, a middle-aged activist, has his cat Uglypuss stolen by a woman named Becka out of spite with whom he had a relationship. Becka attempted to change him but couldn’t. While this is going on Joel meets Amelia but she too is unable to meet his needs.
5. Betty:
A young girl, Elizabeth, has a sister named Catherine whose neighbor is Betty. Catherine pays more attention to another young girl, emotionally abandoning Elizabeth. In return, Elizabeth hangs around Betty. Betty’s husband leaves her and Betty accuses Elizabeth’s mother of something bad. When it is learned that Betty has a brain tumor and she won’t live for very long, Elizabeth forgives her and grows up in the process, understanding that she does not need Betty or her sister.
6. Bluebeard's Egg:
Her husband Ed is the center of Sally’s life but she doesn’t know how to become the center of Ed’s life. At a dinner party she has a split second perception of her best friend and husband together, which is threatening to her. But a story comes to her rescue, one of the many that Sally’s boss at her part-time magazine job tells her. The story is “the Bluebeard’s Egg.” She likens Ed to the egg, which will someday hatch, instead of the evil Wizard who kills and severs women to pieces.
7. Spring Song of the Frogs:
After seeing his anorexic niece at the hospital, Will, a divorced man, meets with Diane. After dinner the two sit at the porch and listen to the frogs and Will thinks that all women become silent and draw away from him in time.
8. Scarlet Ibis: A couple with their daughter go on a vacation to Trinidad and are taken in a decrepit canoe through a swamp to watch the ibises. Through this, the wife Christine appraises her relationship with her husband.
9. The Salt Garden:
Alma, while making an experiment which is a salt garden for her daughter, has a moment of truth experience, an acid flash as she calls it. During this, she reviews her relationships with two men Mort, her husband, and Theo, a dentist who is her lover.
10. The Sin Eater:
The narrator who is a patient of a psychiatrist named Joseph is furious with the psychiatrist for dying as she sees it as an act of desertion.
11. The Sunrise: Yvonne, a 30 year-old artist, chooses strange even possibly dangerous men and stalks them until they consent to being painted by her. Her show has been closed by the police for obscenity and the problems of a young couple and their child where Yvonne lives affects her. The last man she paints reminds her of what she herself could become.
12. Unearthing Suite:
A narrator who has a wild imagination and avoids decisions tells of her down-to-earth parents. Her father is too interested in nature and her mother thinks less is more. The narrator finds out that her mother’s secret of being happy was a trade-off and she too will have to face the real world eventually.

writers of short stories as an example that shows
higher levels of meaning than what is on the surface of each story.

the way the author used flashbacks without tiring the reader and the way she used many symbols that affected her stories and hinted at the internal makings and change inside her characters.

Margaret Atwood has created with “The Bluebeard’s Egg” an excellent book of short stories through striking characters and finesse in story telling.
Margaret Atwood is a Canadian writer, born in 1939 in Ottawa. After doing her master's in Radcliffe College, she became a treasure not only to Canada but to the entire world as a writer and teacher. She has received many awards and honors, such as The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence in the U.K., the National Arts Club Medal of Honor for Literature in the U.S., Le Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France, and she was the first winner of the London Literary Prize. She has honorary degrees from universities across Canada, and one from Oxford University in England. Among her many works are: The Handmaid’s Tale, Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Edible Woman, The Blind Assassin, Good Bones and Simple Murders, Bluebeard’s egg, Morning in the Burned House (poetry).

this book is entertaining and each story is wonderfully crafted, satirical, and written in a dramatic style. The author has a keen eye that sees the undercurrents inside human relationships.

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Created Dec 28, 2003 at 10:19pm • Submit your own review...