Three women become unlikely friends after each of them encounters Zenia, a smart, beautiful, and manipulative woman. Entering their lives when they were in college, in the 1960s, and then over the next thirty years, she damages each of them. Then, out of the blue, they are notified that she is dead. Or is she?
This is another one of Atwood's books that I have read several times because I enjoy it so much. I enjoy revisiting the story, and the character, and even though I know what's going to happen, I enjoy the book each time I read it. In this book, we have three different women: Tony, a university professor who focuses on the history of war, Roz, a top-level executive, and Charis, a woman who seems a bit stuck in her flower-child past. Because each of them has a different kind of encounter with Zenia, it makes Zenia seem like a different women. Roz, Tony and Charis all come from different backgrounds, but it is Zenia who binds them together, bringing out their different strengths.
I had just re-read Cat's Eye, and then grabbed The Robber Bride, which made me notice something I hadn't picked up on before. Because both books have the same setting, and are in the same time period, more or less, there were some similarities. Some of the observations by the characters felt a bit interchangeable between the two books, for example.
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