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Originally Posted by Catlady
Title please?
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A Five Year Sentence by Bernice Rubens. She was briefly popular around 1980, IIRC, and I read a few of her books, but I had no memory of this one.
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Trees and water--they simply seem part of the atmosphere, and the water especially had a clear factual basis, what with the ocean crossing and the burial at sea (I think that was factual, can't remember) and the journey after the murders. So I tend to think that Atwood just expanded on what she had to work with in the historical record.
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The water came across as unearned to me, or ham-handed as you put it. Sometimes water is just water, which is where I'd have lodged it in the context of this story, with the ocean crossing etc. as fairly mundane. But it seemed to me that Atwood meant more by it, as with Simon's plunging into water in his dream or the woman on the cliffs, except that I don't know what her point is other than a very generic or well-worn one.