(A-) 80% | Very GoodNotes: Its scarlet woman's pretty passive, target of temptation, not much plot, though food for thought is ample captivation.*Check out progress updates for detailed commentary: Progress updates:01/01/2023 - Preamble:(1) It's been New Year tradition for me to have either my first book of the year or the last book of the preceding year (some years both) be a super-popular novel.- "The Handmaid's Tale" was on clearance!(2) When I say "super-popular," I don't mean the YA novel d...

This book focuses on a dystopian society where the child-bearing women are rounded up and forced to produce children for the barren Wives. This is an interesting book with flashbacks to the "before" period, the period before Gilead. It is also very interesting to know that this book was written more than 35 years ago, but it still relevant today. Although serious, this book really gave me food for thought in more ways than one. There are some key differences between this book and the Hulu mini-s...

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.

Update 2022: As Stephen King wrote on Twitter: Welcome to The Handmaid's TaleI. NightI am lying awake in my bed. I keep my eyes closed and beg sleep to come. Fruitlessly! Outside, the rain is whipping the windows without mercy. My husband is sleeping next to me, oblivious to my struggle. I need my thoughts to go away. I need to forget that I just finished the Handmaid's Tale and its effect on me. I knew I should have resumed myself to the self-imposed daily quota of 10%. But no. I had to read th...

Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is a tale of terror as well as a warning. The dystopian future she describes in "Gilead" which appears to be centered in Boston (due to the reference to Mass Ave and the town of Salem) is chillingly misogynistic where women are reduced to strict categories: Martha for housework and cooking, Jezebels (easy to guess, right?), Eyes, Angels (soldiers for the state), infertile Wives and potentially fertile Handmaids. It is beautifully written with lots of flashba...

I’ve been moved by books in the past, many times, but I’ve never before read a book that has emotionally drained me to such a degree. This is frightening and powerful. And sometimes it only takes a single paragraph to make you realise how much so: “Yes, Ma’am, I said again, forgetting. They used to have dolls, for little girls, that would talk if you pulled a string at the back; I thought I was sounding like that, voice of a monotone, voice of a doll. She probably longed to slap my face. They...

It's been almost five years since I wrote my review. I've rewritten large parts of it for clarity. The main idea remains the same. Extremist Judeo-Christian beliefs have won America's culture war. Now women have no rights. They are slaves to men and the biblical, patriarchal society in which they live. The Handmaid's Tale is the first-person account of one of these enslaved women.Massachusetts Turns Into Saudi Arabia?More than thirty years have passed since The Handmaid's Tale was first publi...

There are only a small handful of books that have affected me in a REALLY personal way. In a way that I always try to put into words and always, ultimately, fail. I have read a lot of books over the years and I've liked many, disliked plenty too, loved and hated a smaller amount... but out of the thousands I've read, there's less than ten - maybe even less than five, now I think about it - that honestly hit me so hard that I would go so far as to say they changed me.The Handmaid's Tale is a book...

(edited from a paper I wrote in college about the book)In 1986, when Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid’s Tale, Ronald Regan had declared “Morning in America,” and society was going to renew itself by returning to the old values. The Christian right, in its infancy at the time, was rising in reaction to the Free Love, and the horrors of AIDs. The 1984 election gave us Willie Horton, and a reminder about how violent and evil society had become. Finally, even though Chernobyl happened shortly ...

Not a very well written book. The writing itself is clumsy. It doesn't feel like you're reading a story; it feels like you're reading a piece of writing. Good writers put their words together for a calculated effect, but Atwood's words aren't just calculated-- they're contrived. In a good piece of writing, you shouldn't see the writer at all. You shouldn't see the structure of their writing. All you should see is the story. If you're seeing the deliberate cadence of a phrase, or the use of repet...