Finished: Alias Grace (Atwood) A fictional story based on the 1843 real-life murders of Thomas Kinnear and Nancy Montgomery in Canada. Kinnear was a gentleman and Nancy his housekeeper, who he was having an affair with. At the heart of the book is Grace Marks, the servant girl hired by Nancy who arrived at the house to help when she was only fifteen years old. Having had an extremely tough childhood, where she watched her mother die at sea crossing over from Ireland, worked to the bone by her abusive father while caring for her younger siblings, and scarred by the death of the only friend she ever had, Mary, from her previous place of employment, Grace already has three strikes against her. By the time she is sixteen, Thomas Kinnear and Nancy Montgomery have been brutally murdered and Grace and the farm hand, James McDermott, have been arrested for their murders. As the story opens, Grace has been in the penitentiary for fifteen years and is set to be interviewed by budding psychiatric doctor, Simon Jordan. It is through this series of interviews, and a series of letters written between characters, that we hear Grace's entire story. She claims to have no memory of the actual murders, but can give vivid detail of everything leading up to the murders and everything within hours afterwords. Is she simply playing the amnesiac? Was this her way of escaping being hung, the fate James McDermott suffered? Grace's story is terribly sad and compelling and depressing, but you come away still never knowing the real truth of whether she's a calculating, bold-blooded murderess. Grace says McDermott did it and threatened her life as well, but she has no memory of the details. McDermott says that Grace promised him she'd bed and marry him if he'd only get rid of Nancy and Thomas. We'll never know the real truth. Sadly, Simon deteriorates a bit in the environment and at times fancies himself in love with Grace, and he also has a sordid affair with his married landlady, which is totally against his character. When he realizes he's in too deep, and has really come away with no answer after weeks of interviewing Grace, he heads for home. Home for him, though, is the U.S., which is about to enter the Civil War. Apparently Simon then fights for the North and suffers a head injury that renders HIM with no memory of his recent past, and all his dealings with Graces. Perhaps that's actually for the best? Eventually, when Grace is 45, she is granted clemency and released from the penitentiary. In the book she marries and settles down to a quiet life with her husband, eerily, a teenage boy (at the time of the murders) who gave testimony that helped put her away. In reality, people lost touch with her and she disappeared from public and the limelight. The book itself took me forever to read, maybe because of the subject material. I was really surprised to find an Atwood book that I didn't tear through!