The Handmaid's Tale in Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge

Dec 01, 2009 Allie rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, fiction, audience-adults, own, dystopia-utopia, genre-sff, gender-stuff

This review was written for Banned Books Week 2013 on my library's blog, with my original GR review after.

I can hardly believe The Handmaid’s Tale, the 1985 SF masterpiece, is only Margaret Atwood’s fifth novel. And I can hardly talk about the book without getting overly excited, because it is one of my very favorite books by my very favorite author. When I finished reading it, I felt so energized by the subject, the themes, and the language. I kept thinking about it, turning it over in my mind, This review was written for Banned Books Week 2013 on my library's blog, with my original GR review after.

I can hardly believe The Handmaid’s Tale, the 1985 SF masterpiece, is only Margaret Atwood’s fifth novel. And I can hardly talk about the book without getting overly excited, because it is one of my very favorite books by my very favorite author. When I finished reading it, I felt so energized by the subject, the themes, and the language. I kept thinking about it, turning it over in my mind, combing through the details, and letting it sink in.
It takes place in the dystopian, distant-ish future in the Republic of Gilead, ambiguously located somewhere within the former United States. The society is a theocratic military dictatorship initially founded by a radical pseudo-Christian cult via a terrorist coup d’état. Some unnamed kind of environmental, social, and physical degradation presumably motivated the overthrow. Whatever happened left most of the women infertile and most of the newborn babies deformed. The job of having children falls to Handmaids, women conscripted into domestic servitude and used solely for their reproductive capacity. The idea of Handmaids is loosely based on the biblical story of Jacob impregnating his wife’s handmaidens Bilhah and Zilpah. They distort that idea and use it idea to justify sexual slavery; they’re trying to repopulate after all.

The main character (and first-person narrator of the book) is a handmaid named Offred – signifying that she is the handmaid Of Fred. The narrative flashes from the bleak present to her past. She remembers these totalitarian ideas taking hold and her world changing, slowly at first and then at a break-neck pace. In her past she was married to a man named Luke and had a daughter. They were all separated, and the extremely remote possibility of being reunited with either keeps her going. All Handmaids do on a daily basis is the grocery shopping, which seems dull except that all the while she has an intense inner world where she tries to preserve parts of her identity that are gradually being worn away. She has endless, uneventful days which she tries not to fill with painful memories of a world where things made sense.

This book is so rich with imagery and ideas that I could not possibly take it all in on one reading. It was banned in North Carolina for being “sexually explicit, violently graphic and morally corrupt” – hardly things we’re unfamiliar with in our world today. Margaret Atwood is very careful to incorporate only things that either had happened in different contexts already or things that were in the realm of possibility. She takes ideas and historical events and pushes them to a very extreme conclusion. That idea gives you a novel that at times seems fanciful, until you really think about it and there are distinct historical precedents. This book forces you to look at the world and see what it could become of the straits were dire enough.

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Original April 2013 review:
Ha cha cha!

This was really a treat, and it is a book I had been planning to read for years. I was familiar with the general plot and Margaret Atwood talked about it in her talks at Emory (and then in In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination), and it certainly did not disappoint.

I know Atwood specifically set out to write speculative fiction grounded in reality. When she wrote it in 1985 everything that happens in the book had already happened (in some way, shape, or form) or was within the realm of possibility at the time she wrote it. There were times where I got caught up thinking of the chronology of how the events could have transpired, but I think about places like Iran in the 70s and even the persecution of Baha'is there today and it doesn't feel too far off. ...more

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Apr 19, 2010 Sarah rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: book-club, fiction, dystopian

Reread for a book club that actually took place, and it provided fodder for a really robust and interesting discussion about freedom, security, fertility, sacrifices, family, government, literary symbols, fear, and hope. This isn't a fun read, so maybe every 10 years is enough. Original review from 2007:

I read this for a book group at my local branch this week that was canceled due to the ice storm, but glad that I reread this book. The same book group read Remains of the Day last time and we d ...more

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Oct 22, 2012 pianogal rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: sb-book-club, read-in-2012

I'm kinda tired of reading books that I'm supposed to like, but that I hate. I've wanted to read Margaret Atwood for a while, so when this was picked for Nashville's city-wide read, I was excited. However, I felt like I was 2 steps behind everyone the whole time. Also, I intensely dislike books that are misogynistic.

And don't even get me started on the ending...sigh... ...more

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Jan 29, 2012 Tara rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: body-views

I just re-read this novel after watching a few episodes of the Hulu series.
This book is prophetic in its creation, and terrifying for an audience in 2017. Scarily plausible, this novel is a must-read today. Sometimes I read it like I was reading an account of history, learning from our past, but remembering it is a dystopian future left me cold. Read it.

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