Atonement - a book review

Just finished Ian McEwan's Atonment over the Christmas holidays:

This book has 4 parts, and its saving grace is part 1, which is the only reason it gets three stars (as opposed to 1). Parts 2 and 3 are fluff, added for melodramatic effect, and are a painful attempt at making this a war epic.
Part 4 tries to bring it all together, succeeds in some respects and fails in others. I thought the 80th birthday party was completely cheesy.

I enjoyed McEwan's writing style. Although slightly laborious, I liked his detailed descriptions of feelings, feelings about feelings, the countryside, hot summer days, people and events. I empathized with the characters (only in part 1), and even got the part about atonement (in part 4). I thought that the ending, where Arabella could be any of the female characters in the book was very clever.
**** WARNING - giving away some of the plot - do not read further, if you haven't read the book **** I like that there was no reconciliation between the sisters. It makes it more real. However, Robbie's and Cecilia's premature deaths makes their love, and therefore the book, seem pointless - almost like "all that for nothing" or "so many years for two months together". Most of their relationship is imagined or based on wistful memories and letters. It may have been a better book if they had moved away and started a new life, with some sort of character development and some sort of description of their lives together in addition to the brief glimpse through Briony's eyes. All in all, a good read, but not brilliant, which is sad, because it has all the potential to be so. Oh ya, and the great "mystery" was as transparent as a window right at the moment it happened.

Baking mud pies

It’s been many many years since I’ve baked. A long time ago, I used to be quite the baker, even venturing such exotic delights as sacher torte. I could make melt-in-your-mouth carrot cake, banana bread, and one of my best friends got to be my best friend because 17 years ago, I baked a yummilicious chocolate cake for her birthday.

Well, reminiscing aside, I was not particularly excited when M asked me to help her bake cookies for N’s pre-school Halloween party. But anyway, being the nice person I am, I agreed to tag along for moral support. Armed with Betty Crocker’s sugar cookie mix and confectioner’s sugar, we began our little experiment.

Several hours later, with flour on my face, in my hair, and unfortunately also on my nice cashmere sweater, we had what were supposed to be bat, ghost, and pumpkin shaped cookies, but instead were blobs. Yes, blobs! Somehow inside the oven, these nice little shapes that we had so carefully cut out and laid onto the baking tray morphed into stuck-to-each-other, shapeless thingamies.

Now no self-respecting mother can embarrass her child by sending blob-shaped cookies to school, can she? So M, bless her heart, decided that we must decorate these amorphous shapes so that they at least bore some resemblance to what they were supposed to be, and were not just amoeboid (and sadly burnt) things.

We frantically searched for a recipe for sugar frosting, and after much mixing and tasting we had a mass of sweet, oh, so sweet, orange, (very orange) – stuff. We proceeded to lay on generous helpings of orange goop onto our “cookies”, hoping this might make them look like pumpkins.

They didn’t particularly look like pumpkins, or taste like cookies, but I haven’t had so much fun in a long, long time - almost as much fun as baking mud pies.