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hurricaneslez's review against another edition
4.0
Overall, the plot was good.
Aunt Lydia's point of view was written beautifully, as I had expected it to be when I opened this book. It was detailed and the language was sophisticated enough for the reader to understand it was an adult speaking.
The other two points of view, however, weren't quite as well written. They were juvenile, like what you would anticipate from a teen/young adult novel. These parts left a lot to be desired in regards to composition, but the story was easy to follow.
Aunt Lydia's point of view was written beautifully, as I had expected it to be when I opened this book. It was detailed and the language was sophisticated enough for the reader to understand it was an adult speaking.
The other two points of view, however, weren't quite as well written. They were juvenile, like what you would anticipate from a teen/young adult novel. These parts left a lot to be desired in regards to composition, but the story was easy to follow.
heychrissy's review against another edition
dark
emotional
hopeful
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
nonetheless_she_read's review against another edition
5.0
Well, I guess now that I'm quarantined and, consequently unemployed, I may as well keep my hands busy.
I began reading The Testaments during the COVID-19 quarantine in Puerto Rico, where I am from. The book was a gift from a friend who shares my interest in feminist theory and the law. We're attracted to the Gilead series because it integrates those two interests into a compelling story. Moreover, I love dystopic fiction and the way that dystopian societies are built on analogies and symbolism to represent the values lost and promoted by civilization.
When I started reading, I had already seen the Hulu series based on the original book and finished the novel, The Handmaid's Tale. Reading this novel made me think of my reactions to The Handmaid's Tale. When I read the original novel, mostly because I had already seen a few episodes of the Hulu series, I felt a little cheated. Although I enjoyed the novel and recognized that the series contained a lot of the best quotes from the book, I found the novel a little flat. The novel gave me the same feeling as George Orwell's 1984. I felt this environment full of a somber sort of acceptance, melancholy, and yearning. The narration is meant to be a series of audiotapes, by an unidentified first-person narrator. The end, like 1984's is disheartening, there is no hope or escape. Because of that, the novel did not develop any of the characters in the way the series did. I kept wanting to know more about these characters that surrounded the narrator.
In The Testaments, Atwood uses a similar narration device, but she uses three first-person narrators: Nicole, Agnes and Aunt Lydia. Although it is the characters of Nicole and Agnes that move the story forward, I was most engrossed by Aunt Lydia's story. In The Testaments, Aunt Lydia is the inside source that ignites the explosion that leads to Gilead's demise. They frame her character differently than in the series. In the Hulu series, Aunt Lydia's background is revealed as well. She was a teacher and a devoutly religious person, but she was insecure and prone to lash out. That made her perfect for the role that the Aunts appear to have in Gilead in the series. They teach and they discipline.
However, Atwood has different plans. In The Testaments, Aunt Lydia's background is the law. She was a judge, family court mostly. She was a strong-willed woman, with no spiritual leanings that the reader can tell. She was chosen to be an Aunt, by Gilead leaders, because the Aunts had a more important task. The Aunts were tasked with creating, what could be seen as, a separate legal sphere for women. They were to create laws that would rule women's conduct and their roles in society. After all, the doings of women are not a man's concern and they shouldn't be kept from important matters on such trifles.
When she reflects on her role in Gilead, Aunt Lydia says:
"Such regrets are of no practical use. I made choices, and then, having made them, I had fewer choices. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one most traveled by. It was littered with corpses, as such roads are. But as you will have noticed, my own corpse is not among them."
Aunt Lydia prides herself on having witted her way into surviving Gilead and even thriving in it. Throughout the novel she explains how she climbed the ladder of authority and kept her place, all the while collecting the secrets that would inevitably bring Gilead down. One of the reasons that I was so captivated by Aunt Lydia was actually her legal background.
I am a lawyer, or soon to be, and I am constantly fascinated by the law. I love to read about law, its history and the ways it interacts with the word. I also enjoy writing about law, having published to law review articles before graduating from law school and working on two different law review publications. However, in the last few years, in Puerto Rico, the ongoing crises have served to remind me that law is fiction and it only exists if people believe in it enough to follow it and enforce it. There was something about that in a book I read recently, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. As a professor of mine was fond of telling his History of Law students, lawyers are useless in a crisis. Once the apocalypse comes, no one will need us. I felt echoes of all those sentiments in Aunt Lydia's inner musings.
At one point she says:
"To pass the time I berated myself. Stupid, stupid, stupid: I'd believed all that claptrap about life, liberty, democracy, and the rights of the individual I'd soaked up at law school. These were eternal verities and we would always defend them. I'd depended on that, as if on a magic charm."
I feel that way about myself often. I am so in love with the law that I find myself believing it can save us. But it can't. The Handmaid's Tale takes place in the United States after a religious faction stages a coup and takes over the government. Both books and the series reference the subtle, albeit familiar ways, in which the faction takes over. They suspended the constitution claiming the state of emergency, they approved laws that no one had heard of to strip women of their right to own property, then they froze assets and closed borders.
I began reading The Testaments during the COVID-19 quarantine in Puerto Rico, where I am from. The book was a gift from a friend who shares my interest in feminist theory and the law. We're attracted to the Gilead series because it integrates those two interests into a compelling story. Moreover, I love dystopic fiction and the way that dystopian societies are built on analogies and symbolism to represent the values lost and promoted by civilization.
When I started reading, I had already seen the Hulu series based on the original book and finished the novel, The Handmaid's Tale. Reading this novel made me think of my reactions to The Handmaid's Tale. When I read the original novel, mostly because I had already seen a few episodes of the Hulu series, I felt a little cheated. Although I enjoyed the novel and recognized that the series contained a lot of the best quotes from the book, I found the novel a little flat. The novel gave me the same feeling as George Orwell's 1984. I felt this environment full of a somber sort of acceptance, melancholy, and yearning. The narration is meant to be a series of audiotapes, by an unidentified first-person narrator. The end, like 1984's is disheartening, there is no hope or escape. Because of that, the novel did not develop any of the characters in the way the series did. I kept wanting to know more about these characters that surrounded the narrator.
In The Testaments, Atwood uses a similar narration device, but she uses three first-person narrators: Nicole, Agnes and Aunt Lydia. Although it is the characters of Nicole and Agnes that move the story forward, I was most engrossed by Aunt Lydia's story. In The Testaments, Aunt Lydia is the inside source that ignites the explosion that leads to Gilead's demise. They frame her character differently than in the series. In the Hulu series, Aunt Lydia's background is revealed as well. She was a teacher and a devoutly religious person, but she was insecure and prone to lash out. That made her perfect for the role that the Aunts appear to have in Gilead in the series. They teach and they discipline.
However, Atwood has different plans. In The Testaments, Aunt Lydia's background is the law. She was a judge, family court mostly. She was a strong-willed woman, with no spiritual leanings that the reader can tell. She was chosen to be an Aunt, by Gilead leaders, because the Aunts had a more important task. The Aunts were tasked with creating, what could be seen as, a separate legal sphere for women. They were to create laws that would rule women's conduct and their roles in society. After all, the doings of women are not a man's concern and they shouldn't be kept from important matters on such trifles.
When she reflects on her role in Gilead, Aunt Lydia says:
"Such regrets are of no practical use. I made choices, and then, having made them, I had fewer choices. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one most traveled by. It was littered with corpses, as such roads are. But as you will have noticed, my own corpse is not among them."
Aunt Lydia prides herself on having witted her way into surviving Gilead and even thriving in it. Throughout the novel she explains how she climbed the ladder of authority and kept her place, all the while collecting the secrets that would inevitably bring Gilead down. One of the reasons that I was so captivated by Aunt Lydia was actually her legal background.
I am a lawyer, or soon to be, and I am constantly fascinated by the law. I love to read about law, its history and the ways it interacts with the word. I also enjoy writing about law, having published to law review articles before graduating from law school and working on two different law review publications. However, in the last few years, in Puerto Rico, the ongoing crises have served to remind me that law is fiction and it only exists if people believe in it enough to follow it and enforce it. There was something about that in a book I read recently, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. As a professor of mine was fond of telling his History of Law students, lawyers are useless in a crisis. Once the apocalypse comes, no one will need us. I felt echoes of all those sentiments in Aunt Lydia's inner musings.
At one point she says:
"To pass the time I berated myself. Stupid, stupid, stupid: I'd believed all that claptrap about life, liberty, democracy, and the rights of the individual I'd soaked up at law school. These were eternal verities and we would always defend them. I'd depended on that, as if on a magic charm."
I feel that way about myself often. I am so in love with the law that I find myself believing it can save us. But it can't. The Handmaid's Tale takes place in the United States after a religious faction stages a coup and takes over the government. Both books and the series reference the subtle, albeit familiar ways, in which the faction takes over. They suspended the constitution claiming the state of emergency, they approved laws that no one had heard of to strip women of their right to own property, then they froze assets and closed borders.
ally_reads2's review
5.0
As brilliant as The Handmaid's Tale! An definite "in-one-sitting" book, absolutely devoured it! The only thing that was a weaker point perhaps - *spoiler* ahead - was how nobody ever suspected Aunt Lydia's character of plotting anything, even at the end when everything was falling apart. But who knows? People are easily influenced and may revere the mere status of another person enough to stay loyal through any lies.
char_722's review
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.25
danib11's review against another edition
4.0
The audio narration is fantastic - that bumps it up to 4. In reality this a 3 maybe 3.5 story. Enjoyable enough but not as gripping at The Handmaid’s Tale.
nana2's review
adventurous
challenging
emotional
hopeful
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
katykelly's review against another edition
5.0
World-enhancing, question-answering, depth-creating account of 'what happened next'.
I loved this from the start. As someone who was growing up around the time The Handmaid's Tale was written, who discovered the book as a teenager and has seen as an adult dystopian fiction take off, using Atwood as a basis, then see shades of it in real life... I wanted to know what the author would say if returning to Gilead in 2019.
The TV series is its own world, much as I've enjoyed it. Though I was beyond thrilled to hear Ann Dowd's voice at the beginning returning as Aunt Lydia, it was clear who she was. And she undoubtedly IS the voice we need for this woman.
With three women continuing the story of Gilead 15 years after Offred/June's tale ended, I was hooked on hearing their accounts. The glimpses they give us of their worlds as well as their own stories were seamlessly intertwined, with each giving us a different perspective.
I don't want to go into plot at all. I've heard others say this is slow and adds nothing to the story. I didn't find this to be true at all. Each account is full of characters, interactions, plotting, scheming, Gilead in all its monstrous, binding and evil forms.
You can't read these and NOT think about certain countries, individuals and political systems in the world today. You can't believe we can let these extremes exist out there...
The three accounts begin with some mystery, though I found I knew exactly what was going on from the beginning. I loved flitting between each of the characters, watching the younger two grow up and find their own voices and minds, and seeing how the stories came together.
Full of insight, rage and fight. Thank you Ms Atwood for bringing us a conclusion and closure. We needed this.
Fantastic voice cast, well-respected and known voices as well as some new talent, a focused and intense reading of the book. Very easy to follow as an Audible read. If you've read the first, this will satisfy and answer questions.
With thanks to Nudge Books for providing a sample Audible copy.
I loved this from the start. As someone who was growing up around the time The Handmaid's Tale was written, who discovered the book as a teenager and has seen as an adult dystopian fiction take off, using Atwood as a basis, then see shades of it in real life... I wanted to know what the author would say if returning to Gilead in 2019.
The TV series is its own world, much as I've enjoyed it. Though I was beyond thrilled to hear Ann Dowd's voice at the beginning returning as Aunt Lydia, it was clear who she was. And she undoubtedly IS the voice we need for this woman.
With three women continuing the story of Gilead 15 years after Offred/June's tale ended, I was hooked on hearing their accounts. The glimpses they give us of their worlds as well as their own stories were seamlessly intertwined, with each giving us a different perspective.
I don't want to go into plot at all. I've heard others say this is slow and adds nothing to the story. I didn't find this to be true at all. Each account is full of characters, interactions, plotting, scheming, Gilead in all its monstrous, binding and evil forms.
You can't read these and NOT think about certain countries, individuals and political systems in the world today. You can't believe we can let these extremes exist out there...
The three accounts begin with some mystery, though I found I knew exactly what was going on from the beginning. I loved flitting between each of the characters, watching the younger two grow up and find their own voices and minds, and seeing how the stories came together.
Full of insight, rage and fight. Thank you Ms Atwood for bringing us a conclusion and closure. We needed this.
Fantastic voice cast, well-respected and known voices as well as some new talent, a focused and intense reading of the book. Very easy to follow as an Audible read. If you've read the first, this will satisfy and answer questions.
With thanks to Nudge Books for providing a sample Audible copy.
alicebme's review against another edition
5.0
I always enjoy a book with female perspectives, especially from varying ages. Voices ring authentic, and Atwood gets all the bits right as usual.
They let us play the game sometimes, but we’re never permitted to win. I guess we’re just fighting for moments for ourselves, our sisters, our daughters. Just moments.
They let us play the game sometimes, but we’re never permitted to win. I guess we’re just fighting for moments for ourselves, our sisters, our daughters. Just moments.