Cat’s Eye

Author/Guide: Margaret Atwood

Why a Booktrail?

2000s: A painter, returns to her past in Toronto to find herself overwhelmed by it and the memories it produces

ISBN: 978-1853811265
Genre: Fiction

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What you need to know before your trail

Elaine Risley is a painter who once had a best friend called Cordelia. Cordelia however nice the name sounded was nothing more than a bully and a tormentor and filled Elaine’s childhood with memories of betrayal and cruelty.

When Elaine sees Toronto as an adult, she is forced to face her past and her greatest fears. The Ghost of Cordelia has haunted her for 40 years and now it’s time to face the truth of what really happened.

Locations

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Travel Guide

Best friends and best enemies? We’ve all got tales of girls from school but imagine going back to the school gates and reliving everything you feared and have feared for years? Of looking up and seeing the cloud that has lingered over your head the most of your adult life.

The stream of consciousness that floats around the city of Toronto is interesting as it is scarily possible that almost everyone reading it will be able to identify with Elaine’s emotions. She tells the story of her life through her experiences in and around the city and like any place, this series of memories links to one person and to Elaine’s journey since her childhood. Elaine acts as a sort of guide or navigator as she navigates the memories of her life and offers up a series of them which connected show quite literarily a person’s journey throughout life as the navigate the moral maze that life can be. Elaine’s artwork in a small gallery in Toronto is the starting point of a city and a person on display.

Streetview Maps

1) Toronto - King Street
Jon's studio is somewhere on King street

4) Toronto -"Flat Lake Ontario"
With a zero at the beginning and a zero at the end”

Booktrailer Review

Susan @thebooktrailer

The structure of this novel was very clever I thought as Atwood has not followed the usual chapter and numbered chapter structure really but there are snippets, memories as if stuck in a rough sort of order in a scrap book. Don’t think it makes it confusong through as it doesn’t, and I can’t really think that there would be a better way to tell this story. I think we all have someone that we remember from school either for good or bad reasons and this was a character and emotion led read. Every Margaret Atwood I read is so different from the other and this was one to remind me of why I rate her so much as a writer.