Similar to my reading of The Age of Innocence two years ago, I was pleasantly surprised by my reading of this. I read it in high school, but of course was not impressed and definitely didn’t enjoy it, but now almost 20 years later, I get it. I’m going to keep slowly working through all the books I read in high school.
Not only was I able to appreciate the beautiful prose and stark setting thanks to living in Massachusetts now, I was also able to make connections from this to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, a connection I made last time I read Wharton too! The biggest parallel of the two works was the structure of the novel, a visiting traveler/worker has an interaction of some type with the protagonists and then gets the rest of the story from the locals. It’s all third party he said she said with some basic observations, and it works.
What this books needs more than anything, is a good editor: there were continuity errors, there were issues with over description and there were issues with dialogue. And the saddest part is the story and characters were solid enough, but the editing really let it down. [Some of it may have been fixed in the final version of the book, but if it were me I would not have released this to reviewers with these types of errors.]
I did not expect to read this so soon or so quickly. When I first heard Atwood was revisiting 
I discovered Linda Holmes years ago when I started listening to NPR’s