Well, that was as soul-drenching as any double bill ever was (even though The Testaments is marginally more optimistic than The Handmaid's Tale). 

It's not always a good idea for an author to revisit one of their standout classics decades later, but in this instance it clearly worked.  Atwood stays faithful to the original tale while supplying additional depth to the world she created there.  (Now it remains to be seen whether the TV series, in turn, is going to stay true to the story as set out in The Testaments, which is set a decade and a half later.  Though I'm not sure Atwood herself considers more than a few basic facts from the TV series "canon" as far as her novels are conscerned.) 

And Atwood has clearly done her homework on dictatorships, theocratic and otherwise -- which is, of course, a large part of what makes Gilead come across as so goddamned credible (and hence, so goddamned frightening).  Like the authors of other dystopias (Orwell's 1984, Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Du Maurier's Rule Britannia) -- and also like Terry Pratchett in the first Night Watch novel, Guards' Guards! -- she points out that once a country's democratic foundations have been allowed to weaken, it doesn't even take a violent toppling of government for a dictatorship to take root -- and while she may have been inspired by recent events to revisit Gilead and write The Testaments, this clearly is at the heart of The Handmaid's Tale as well, as it is there that the notion is presciently first given voice.

I'm glad I went through both novels back to back, and Halloween Bingo couldn't have ended on a bigger exclamation mark.  I also fervently hope the world doesn't even get within the equator's total length of Gilead, however; or rather, the actually existing theocracies will eventually be rooted out once and for all and no new ones will be added, anywhere on earth.  Most especially and for the immediate future I hope the Western world will come to its collective senses and manage to make a U-turn from the course that it started to take somewhere around the mid-2010s.  Heaven knows what the participants of late-22nd century historical conferences will otherwise have to say about us.

I've put this off long enough, I think. I've been procrastinating in writing this because I wasn't sure what to rate it or how far to go. I hadn't read this before, so I felt I ought to finish it even when I discovered how much I didn't like it.

Now I've read some Atwood before, but I still expected more from this. It's so well known that I thought it had to be well-written. I thought it would be the exception to my previous Atwood experiences (Alias Grace and Oryx and Crake). I thought earlier Atwood had to be better Atwood. Not so much.

It's not that I hated it. It failed to evoke any emotions in me stronger than annoyance and exasperation. I was bored. The narrative felt stilted and awkward. I don't care that it was a literary device. It just tried too hard.

I guess that's what you need to do to gain literary acclaim: be really obvious and awkward with your craft. You know, wink at your critics while giving them a little nudge too. And be as tedious as you possible.

Atwood can keep her "speculative fiction" label since I'd consider this bad science fiction, despite the opinions of many of my friends.

Honestly, 1984 feels like such a breath of fresh air after The Handmaid's Tale...

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Am I the only one who finds Margaret Atwood's writing to be tedious?

Since I'm practically the last person on the face of this earth to read this book I'm not even going to waste time doing an overview. I've been digesting this book for over two weeks now. I listened to the audio performance and I thought that might've had some effect on my feelings about this book so I went back and actually read parts of the book that I was conflicted about and I still feel the same way.

We were given the story soooooo slowly and piecemealed together based on whatever Offred decided she might or might not throw out there and I felt like I was pulling teeth trying to get the full picture. I seriously felt like I needed to jump to the end of the book to see if I could get a clearer picture of the entire story and then come back and read the beginning.

Then on top of that, there weren't any clear separations in the audio so it was extremely hard for me to tell if Offred was having flashbacks or if those scenes were happening at that moment. Needless to say, I got off to a very rocky start.

It wasn't until over half-way to three-quarters in, that I finally started actually enjoying the book and then - it just ENDED! Omg, I was so freaking mad. I could not believe it. I absolutely hated that ending! Yeah I got the gist

but I do not like having to infer an ending. It drives me nuts! I like to know 100% that yes, this happened or no, it didn't happen. Not to mention, they never did tell us what happened with her family- or did they and I missed it?? 

I finished this book the other day and I'm still trying to decide how I feel about it. I have several reviews I need to write. Looks like tomorrow is going to be a review day for me...