I really enjoyed this, I felt it was a fitting sequel to The Handmaid's Tale. It might not have answered every question, and it took some time to get used to the 15 year gap, but overall I think it was necessary and very well done. ( )

So satisfying!

It’s definitely not what I was expecting. I’d call it a thriller, while I was expecting more literary fiction. The only previous Atwood I’ve read is The Blind Assassin, which I recall was much more complexly and richly written. Also the tone isn’t all THAT grim, like I figured it would be, despite the sort of society we’re talking about here. I mean, there’s multiple penis jokes in here, y’all!

The primary bad guy, Commander Judd, as physically described by Atwood resembles Santa Claus, if Santa took a really bad turn down the road of totalitarian patriarchy (don’t do it, Santa!). An image of a demented Santa, for me, brings an air of the ridiculous to the proceedings. One of Judd’s characteristics is that he’s only interested in teenage girls: marry one, go a few years, kill her, repeat. Horrible but treated with a touch of the slapstick by Atwood (“rat poison? It’s so easily detectable,” the central character and antihero Aunt Lydia muses. Very sloppy indeed, Santa, tsk tsk).

On the positive side, it’s well paced, and kept me turning the pages. It flew by for being a 400 page novel in the hands of a slow reader. Aunt Lydia is the sort of Machiavellian character it’s enjoyable to encounter in fiction (if only we could keep them all there).

I appreciated how it agreed with Nabokov’s take on totalitarianism: that it is marked more by the ineptness and buffoonery of those in power than by any impressive calculating evil.

I get the sense, reinforced by Atwood’s acknowledgements here, this was written for the entertainment of people who have enjoyed (is that the right word?) The Handmaid’s Tale in its written and televised formats, and not so much because this was a novel that was demanding to be written, so to speak. It exists because there was an eager market for it that didn’t call for it to be exceedingly “literary”. Which is fine. ( )

Sometimes life mirrors art the way Americans have become politically polarised I feel that the Union will break up as they descend into a new civil war. Some States in the South where the religious fervour is still strong could easily slip into a theocratic government as envisioned by Attwood and only time will tell if her books are precognitive. ( )

Although the first book of this three part series is, by far, my favorite, the series, as a whole, is a great work of Speculative Fiction. ( )