Review by lillypillygooseberry - The Handmaid's Tale

lillypillygooseberry 's review for:

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

4.5

adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

this book felt a little confusing at first, but I suppose that's the joy of reading it; slowly putting things together as the narrative goes on, and you begin to understand what exactly has happened to the united states, and ther horror of realizing just how quickly women's rights were taken away. It's incredibly prescient, and i do wonder if Margaret Atwood took some inspiration from Indira Gandhi's rule in India as an inspiration for the basis of her dystopia, or in general wartime periods. It is still a great fear today that a government could declare an emergency in the name of war and then use it as an opportunity to take away all of our rights almost instantly. I also couldn't help but reflect on the increasing digitization of the world, and how that puts so much power into the hands of government and a few private companies. the part where they were just instantly able to remove women's access to their bank accounts because it had all been digitized really brought into perspective how this move towards modernity could easily spell doom for so many of us, and why our right to privacy is so important.
in terms of the characters, I often found myself sympathetic to Offred's plight, even as she might have made bad decisions. the world that she lives in is so demoralizing, and I might have, just like her, kept my head down and just listened to whatever was asked of me without being brave enough to act out. the dread that built up throughout the story as you saw her slowly gain the courage to try things that she shouldn't do had me hanging on to the pages, waiting until something goes wrong. I feel that it was a mercy on the author's part to leave the ultimate fate of Offred unclear, so that we could go into speculations about her future and her family. although perhaps being left to speculate might have been worse in some people's minds. but the horror of this dystopia lingers in my mind long after I read it, and the fact that it is still so relevant to today's struggles for women's rights movement, the fact that so many pro-choice movements and women's rights movements use the handmaid's garb to show the dystopia we're headed into is the mark of a work that is politically prescient. yet, the plights of the characters, their reactions to their situations and the complex multitudes they hold within themselves grounds this book around the people it should always be grounded in: the women who were taken advantage of, whose lives were destroyed, and who couldn't be brave all the time but were perhaps brave enough to live through the pain.

Content Warnings