A review by kdawn999
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

4.0

It’s been several years since I read The Handmaid’s Tale, but I do remember the intentional and maddening loose ends of that novel, that we never got to know what happened to Offred, that the societal structure and the powers behind it were only sketched and hinted at. This sequel fills in almost all of those gaps. It’s told in a similar historical document fashion, but this time there are three women’s voices, whose plots entwine. In this telling, the handmaid’s story is necessary background, but the focus is on the complicated feelings of young girls growing up within and without the totalitarian Gilead regime. Atwood reveals that there were women matriarchs, too, who survived by cunning, carving out a space to plot revenge against the patriarchal stranglehold. This book is more hopeful than the last—positioned for our current American society reeling from the loss of civil rights. The message is that regimes fall, often from hard work and resistance within. I really liked listening to this story and was riveted pretty much the whole way through. Things were perhaps too tidy at the end, but on the whole I’m pleased that this book aims to illuminate the mysterious parts of its predecessor.