"Lady Oracle" (book review)

...by Margaret Atwood, 1976.

And now for an Atwood novel which has nothing to do with science fiction!
Quite an early opus as well.
Still an amazing read - creativity and structural innovations like jewels strewn carelessly all over a beach.
Every page has something interesting and exciting to offer the reader.
Lady Oracle is a female author who relates her life story by means of reminiscences/flashbacks, quotes from her own Gothic romance novels (which link into her own life story), and views the past from her terrace in Terremoto, Italy.
It's a highly humorous set of adventures, and the reader is once again captivated by the strength of characterisation.
It's the literary equivalent of tiramisu, or pate de foie gras - rich, tasty and strong.
My one, small, reservation, and it's possibly a thing of personal preference, is that the novel ends up in the air - tapers off without an heroic conclusion, leaving me strangely unfulfilled - and the other novels I've read by Atwood have similar endings - it's a bit like going on a train journey to Wellington and having to get off at Lower Hutt and take a bus the last few kilometres.
The journey is definitely worth it all the same, and is a journey one could make several times in the course of a lifetime.
9/10.