Review: The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



This is the scariest book I've read in years. I can't remember the last time a book so thoroughly creeped me out but still made me love every second of it. I was kinda over dystopian novels but when assigned my Book Buddy for the month we both had had this one sitting on our shelves for a while. So I jumped into it. She's taking her time with it which I can totally understand, but once I figured out what was going on I just had to get away from it.

Imagine a future where women have all their rights taken away. Where they are no longer allowed to work, no longer allowed to own money, property, even their own kids. A large number of men and women seem to have become infertile and the fertile few are taken and given to high ranking married couples that need children. Veiled by extreme religious officials as what God wanted, women here for procreation, cooking, cleaning, or marrying. These are the only roles they have! Or I guess raising up the ones to be procreators.

The story was some what scattered and told in bits and pieces that make it really suspenseful. You never really know what's going to come next. At the end you get kinda the "historian's perspective" hundreds of years later with people criticizing the authenticity of the "tale" as a woman's confession when she escapes the world. But you don't ever really know what happens to her, which is frustrating but at the same time the way I wanted the book to end.

The most terrifying thing is you can imagine this happening. You can imagine one day are our rights slowly disintegrate this happening to different groups of people. We don't get a lot of back story on what lead up to this, or the period right before the period that lead to this. But what happened the day of the takeover we get and it's horrifying.

I had a very strong reaction to this book that I wasn't expecting. It gave me nightmares. I can't imagine a world that I wouldn't be allowed to work- or maybe the problem is I can see it too easily. If I couldn't work what would I be? For god's sake if I couldn't read what would I bed?



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