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Originally Posted by issybird
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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Thanks. I read the blurb at Amazon, and it doesn't sound as intriguing as your comment about it.
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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.
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I don't know; if I were writing a story that had a lot of water in it already because of the historical basis, I think I'd probably keep using it.
As a reader, I didn't especially notice it as something important--just water, as you say.