An interesting book to read right now for a couple of reasons. One, I just finished 1984 and it was very much a world like the one in 1984. Two, the storyline closely reflects the fears of the current political climate in America.

It is hard to say that a story like this is "great" as that has a positive connotation. I was very enthralling, but terrifying at the same time. As a man, I don't think this story has as deep of an impact on me as it would if I was a woman.

If you like dystopian, you must check this book out. If you are fired up by the recent election, you may want to hold off a bit . . . it will only make it worse.

accidentally shelved this realistic fiction book as sci-fi

part of a series i'm doing in which i review books i read a long time ago

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood is a 1985 publication.

This year I’ve been trying to add books into my reading schedule that 'the entire world has read but me.' This book falls into that category, I think. As it happens, I had downloaded this book from the Kindle Unlimited library a long while back but kept putting it off.

To be honest Dystopian literature is not my favorite. I have dabbled in the genre, but usually, I give it a pass. Not only that, something about all the comparisons to current events made the book feel intimidating and it made me nervous. I’m already in a constant state of anxiety and didn’t know if I wanted to read something that was going to add to it.

Sure enough, right off the bat, I was on edge. I see where the comparisons are coming from now. But I don’t think Margaret Atwood had a crystal ball back in 1985 when this book was first published. That is why I felt this book was so unsettling.

Society, not just in America, but everywhere, has seen periods of progress, followed by enormous setbacks in human rights of all types. Obviously, this novel addresses the rights of women and the LGBTQ community. Religious extremes have prompted some serious conversations about this book, but the set up here, in my opinion, is a means to an end.

Now that I’ve skated past that land -mine-

What I took away from this story was a that it was an important cautionary tale. It’s a strong lesson in complacency which is the most prominent theme, and the one I feel has the most urgency. Today we toss around phrases like ‘new normal’ or ‘normalizing’, which sends chills down my spine.

While this is a fictional story, it does have a basis in real history, revealing cycles of progression and regression.

Is that how we lived, then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is as usual. Even this is as usual, now. We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. Nothing changes instantly: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.

Overall, I’m glad I finally got around to reading this book. It gave me the willies, but it has also given me a lot to chew on. It pretty much sums up my feelings about resting on the laurels of those who have made sacrifices and did the grunt work for the privileges enjoyed by women today.

This book should be a lesson to us all. Complacency comes with consequences. Let’s make sure we never take our rights for granted, and that we continue to fight the good fight for ourselves and future generations.

4 stars

‘Is that how we lived, then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is as usual. Even this is as usual, now.’

As much as i enjoyed 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, this one i loved 100 times more!

this is what a true dystopian novel should be. I was invested and captivated all the way through this with Offred being one of my favorite literature characters!

The ambiguity of the ending leaves a lot to the imagination and is something i don’t always like but in this occasion was very cleverly written, but I don’t know who this will change after i read the testaments.

This book had me shivering at most parts as most novels of this kind. Only the thought of all the events may actually happen.. it has me felling so uneasy and uncertain of what the future holds..

I can already see Atwood being one of my favorite writers and it’s a shame that i did not discover her earlier!

‘Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.’

An ultra male chauvinist, racist, nativist, mono-theocratic organised military coup is the extreme ideologically-driven response to the pervasive ecological, physical and social degradation of an alternate USA in the 20th century; this is the rambling diary of a surrogate slave breeder (a 'handmaiden') of the era. Thought provoking as much as it is disturbing as it so feels very much like the dream aspirational reality that would be very much welcomed by most of the religious far-Right in America today!

Due to its surge in popularity in light of the TV show and then the book sequel, I thought a reread was due before I myself pick up the sequel. Let's talk about the writing! This story is set in a modern not too far in time America(!) and that things have got really bad, and now in 2023 I can see that this is the end-game of a Trump America! What Atwood does so well in this book; is using an unreliable narrator recalling her past, living under such an extreme regime, because it adds another layer to the read. In addition, every twist and turn of her experiences are only revealed as and when she recalls it, which results in almost every few pages, pages of insight, of shock, and awe of the sublimely dark creativity - slash - horror. It's a shame that in time the TV series may come to overshadow the book in culture, but what a book it is; alongside the innovative ideas, the looking-back-in-time PTSD suffering unreliable narrator, the multi-faceted characterisations of both 'good and 'bad people', the twisted alternate history concepts etc. it is wonderfully written, and yet another Margaret Atwood masterclass in storytelling. 10 out of 12. Five Star read.

2023, 2019 and 2010 read

Zombies currently dominate the dystopian landscape, but back when Margaret Atwood published this (1985) Orwell’s 1984 was still in the rear view mirror, yet ever on the horizon, and Communism was still around, so Atwood had an “evil” totalitarian empire to model her fictional one after. Today, as our civil liberties are getting slowly whittled away, is Atwood’s maybe-a-future-of-zombies-wouldn’t-be-so-bad tale prescient?

Maybe.

Ask someone real smart.

A spoilerish overview: The proliferation of nuclear and toxic waste has rendered many women barren. Puritanical zealots overthrow the U.S. government and using their own looney interpretations of the Bible, begin to greatly marginalize the roles of women, until your left with females in the constricted roles of costumed wives, housekeepers, handmaids and…



Okay, it’s more like a Hooker Hotel but still….

The story is told by Offred, a Handmaid, who’s designated to be impregnated by someone in the hierarchy of New Gilead, because those in power are the only one’s allowed to have children and there’s one in every household of power because they’re rare, like a Nintendo Switch. So, as the walls literally and figuratively and literally once again close in on Offred, she attempts to snap out of her imposed lethargy.



Spunk doesn’t play well in the future.

What’s to like.

Atwood does a swell job in the world building department, dolloping out her fun facts in historical and tasty spoonfuls. She even adds some information in the back of the book under “Historical Notes”, but she may as well have called it “Appendix” or “Index” or “Author’s Acknowledgments” for the interest, from me included, it has generated in this buddy read.

Fun factor – If I were single and desperate and looking for women on a dating site, then “I have a dark, gallows-ish sense of humor” would ding some bells for me along with “I am independently wealthy” and "I hate aquatic superheroes" and “I love Spam”.



The narrative structure – Offred’s world doesn’t exist much beyond her room, shopping, the monthly coitus attempt and the occasional game of Scrabble…



…so the fact that her re-telling (shout out to Chaucer for the book’s title and stuff!) is insular and Saul Bellowish makes a lot of sense. She’s got nowhere to go and nothing to do but exist in her head.

Get ready for the counter argument!



What’s not to like.

The narrative structure – The disjointed style Atwood employs has a tendency to bring any momentum the book has to a crashing halt.

Are digressive passages a Canadian literary thing?

This next picture is for you and your digressiveness, Bellow! Look what you’ve wrought!!



This one was a pantsless buddy read with the Intergalactic Consortium of Pantsless Readers.

This was a worthy choice and I’ll dwell upon its message often.

n  n   

“This is a book about what happens when certain casually held attitudes about women are taken to their logical conclusions”

n  n

Somewhere in Maine, in a grim new regime called The Republic of Gilead, fresh laws stripped all women from their rights. Distorting the texts of the Bible, they follow a strict, conservative, extremely religious set of rules, instating a world where homosexuals, abortionists and priests are swiftly executed.

In a setting where more and more women are becoming infertile, female feminists are outlaws called “unwomen”, as a reminder of how they deny their natural and intended purpose on Earth as live, walking wombs. Women’s hierarchy was finally reduced to simply how they serve men. If they have working ovaries, they are handmaids, and their only purpose is to procreate; their objectified, mere instrument condition stamped right in their identity, being renamed Ofglen, Offred, Ofwarren… And like pets they are given masters: the men who lawfully own them. They can’t write, read, listen to music, dance or sing.

There are the Marthas who cook and clean, the wives of the poor, who are forced to wear identical striped dresses so that society can readily identify them, and, of course, if you’re lucky, you marry a Commander, and you’re basically a housewife without house chores. If you are a woman and you don’t fit in any of those categories, you are dead.

This was a frustrating read, because you find yourself immersed in that confining, suffocating world, and you see how so much of that insane, bigoted, sexist society has so many traits that remind you of your own present day-to-day life. Only now it is veiled under tradition, it’s hushed and shadowy, force-fed to all citizens from the day we are born. What is scary today is the subconscious misogyny, which everyone is taught to contemplate as normal. What’s scary is the fact that sometimes we don’t even notice it anymore.

I think this book is extremely special and important. It is to feminism and women’s rights as 1984 is to freedom of speech, expression and privacy.

I'm not 100% sure what to think.

Technically, not a lot is happening in this book.
There's barely any progression in terms of plot.
And tbh I expected this to be way more intense than it actually was.

But it was still so captivating, I didn't want to put it down. The characters were all super interesting and I really liked the writing style as well.

So, not a full 5 star read but definitely a book worth reading.



That ending though? Damn. Cruel. In a very good way.

This dystopian novel was so powerful that I read it twice in two months.

The Handmaid's Tale is set in a country named Gilead, in what used to be the New England region.* The U.S. government has been overthrown by a religious regime and women have lost all their rights, including holding property, being able to read, and even their names. Our narrator is known only as Offred (meaning Of-Fred, the man she serves) and she is a handmaid to a commander in Gilead. Being a handmaid means she has to have regular sex with the commander in the hopes of bearing him a child. The explanation is that many of the women in Gilead are no longer able to conceive healthy children because of pollution and disease, so powerful men get to keep a handmaid.

This novel is fragmented and jumps around in its storytelling, and the reason for this made more sense on my second reading. (I'm not spoiling the ending, but it did alter my perspective on the novel.) Offred tells us her tale in bits and pieces; we see her daily routine and her experiences with the commander, who grants her special favors. Offred also shares stories from her past life, before the regime, and we hear about how she got tasked to be a handmaid.

I'm not going to lie -- this novel is heartbreaking and difficult to read. I'm giving it five stars for its power and its vision, but this isn't a feel-good story. I listened to this on audio, read by the actress Claire Danes, and it's telling that when I tried to read it in print, I had trouble getting through it because the themes are so dark. The prose is strong and Atwood has some great lines in the book, but reading it in print was difficult for me. The audiobook helped me fully appreciate this modern classic.

I would recommend The Handmaid's Tale to readers who like dystopian works, especially novels with social commentary. I'll be thinking about Offred and Gilead for a long time to come.

*Neat Stuff:
Recently Margaret Atwood wrote a fantastic essay in The New York Times Book Review on what her novel means in the age of Donald Trump. In the article, she mentions that she set the location in the novel as Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the university referenced in the book is meant to be Harvard.

First read: February 2017
Second read: March-April 2017

Favorite Quotes
"We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?"

"Like other things now, thought must be rationed. There's a lot that doesn't bear thinking about. Thinking can hurt your chances, and I intend to last."

"A quaint expression you sometimes hear, still, from older people: I hear where you're coming from, as if the voice itself were a traveler, arriving from a distant place. Which it would be, which it is."

"I envy the Commander's Wife her knitting. It's good to have small goals that can be easily attained."

"We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories."

"Better never means better for everyone... It always means worse, for some."

"When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that."

I don't even know where to start with this book??

I was not able to connect with the Characters in the book at all. It was a task to completely finish this book at all.

I know I am in the minority, but I don't know what all the hype was with this book. I think that Atwood was long winded in her writing style and did not help with the connections with the Characters.

I honestly don't have much more to say about this book.

4.8/5 Stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don't let the bastards grind you down.”

What can I even say about this masterpiece of a book? What can I even say that hasn't already been said? I'm awed to my core, this book is a prediction, a revelation, a hymn. This book is so fucking old, yet so fucking relatable and ahead of its time... it reads like 1984. The events in this dystopian book seem like such a close reality which scares me for the future of humanity.

I wanted to read this book for such a long time... but the tv show made me do it, at last. I'm so fascinated by stories like this, dystopian stories that hold truth to them, and I wanted to dive into this book with everything I had. And it happened. This book consumed me, I wanted to know everything, all the little excruciating details of this brand new world, all the thoughts in June's head, everything.

The writing was fascinating and yet sometimes I kinda lost track, especially at the dialogue parts which weren't really dialogue. The pace was a little slow, but I'm so used to YA quick pacing so I don't hold that against it. But this book was never boring or dull, it was everything it should be.

I saw some major differences with the show, the show took some characters and situations and created multiple things that didn't exist in the book. And I commend them on that. The TV show and and the book are two sides of the same coin, what lacked in the former the latter had and the opposite. One thing that let me down about the book is that we didn't see Serena and her relationship with June flourish at all. Their relationship is such a strong dynamic in the show, it is so fascinating to watch. At least we got to see it develop in the show.

I'm so irrevocably happy this story is going to continue, and so soon I've heard. We all know that came to be because of the success of the TV show, but I can't hold that against anyone because the story we are going to follow in the sequel is so much more different than season 2 of the TV show. I can't wait to again devour the next book, and I hope for many nexts. This is my first time reading a book from this author, and I don't think it will be my last.

To sum it all up, read this book. It tackles so many important issues about feminism and liberty of speech and it's even more important to read it if you're a woman. Just do it. You won't regret it. And till the next time, K BYE!!!

Note: Content and trigger warnings are written at the end as they may contain spoilers.

"Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it."

Republic of Gilead (near-future) — Atwood's feminist 1984 births the horrors of the horrifyingly plausible totalitarian and theocratic regime where women are treated as second-class citizens only viewed as reproductive, concubinary political instruments.

Margaret Atwood has been steadfast about her claim that The Handmaid's Tale shan't be classified as science fiction but should instead be rightfully seen as speculative fiction. This makes profound sense as the patriarchal future she imagines presents no single idea that has not touched the history of our present realities; reminding us that the corruption of the state, when forged by society's complacency, has the power to revert us to our antediluvian past or maybe even worse. In Atwood's bleak yet terrifying world, women belong to a Commander which either comes as being an obligatorily submissive Wife, a domestic servant Martha, or a nonconsensual surrogate mother called the Handmaid—unless treated as an outcast after being deemed useless as an Unwoman. Although these labels and duties of the women in Gilead may be classified as extreme, it rings true when juxtaposed with contemporary society's tendency to objectify women and the minorities. As Atwood introduces Offred through her nonlinear and introspective writing style, the reader forms an earnest connection with the protagonist through Atwood's presentation of her heroine's thoughts, painted as harrowing accounts of her present-day trauma and poignant reflections of the past where people lived freely and are protected by their rights. Atwood may have created a deeply human character through Offred, but what she managed to do even greater is to criticize our faulty human tendencies to participate in system-wide oppression, fueling its propagation as long as there are compensations we enjoy.

The Handmaid's Tale may have reminded us not to "let the bastards grind [us] down," but Atwood asks us: what if in our subservience, we become one of those we denounce? Do we abnegate the trivial compensations they offer us for our liberty or do we dauntlessly revolt?

Rep: strong female | feminism

Personal Enjoyment: 4.75 stars
Quality of the Book: 4.7 stars
- Use of Language: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
- Plot and Narrative Arc: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
- Characters: ⭐⭐⭐⭐+
- Integrity: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
- Message: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

AVG: 4.73 stars | RAVE

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CW/TW: systematic rape, sexual violence, sexism, misogyny, oppression

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[Some comments in this post are for the pre-review I wrote which contained highlighted reactions from my status updates. You may check the actual status updates through the links below to understand the context behind the comments.]

Status Updates:
[START] pls shock me Ms. Atwood | come through, feminist 1984!!! | yes, we are happy. what else can i say? | i'm gonna be so dead in Gilead | me when i found out what the job of Handmaids actually is | Atwood makes me feel like a granddad | i feel like i might need to edit my fave books written on my bio again lol | the end is a big cliffhanger, isn't it? | we may call Eurydice from the dead, but we cannot make her answer [END]