SOURCE: A review of Bluebeard's Egg and Other Stories, in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 24, No. 3, Summer, 1987, p. 312.

In the following positive review of Bluebeard's Egg, Lyons asserts that the “stories have many virtues and sources of interest, including the revelations about Atwood's biography, the exploration of her major themes and motifs, and not least of all, their excellence as stories.”

In “Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother,” the first story of this collection, the narrator recalls a key childhood anecdote about bunny rabbit cookies. Offered a wonderful cookie shaped like a bunny rabbit and decorated with a face and clothes of colored icing, the narrator as a child went off to a corner and talked to her cookie instead of gobbling many like her brother. The narrator muses about why her mother repeatedly told her boyfriends this story, whether to prove her “kindliness and essential...