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.

For my final bingo square -- "International Woman of Mystery" -- I've decided on a Margaret Atwood double bill: a reread of The Handmaid's Tale followed by its recent sequel, The Testaments ... if I can stand that extended exposure to Gilead, that is, and don't end up bailing out of The Handmaid's Tale halfway through.  Even if I do, though, I'm still planning on reading The Testaments.  Wish me stamina ...

Final square -- revisiting Rebecca with the idea of a comparison review of the 3 audio versions I own (narrated by Anna Massey, Emma Fielding, and Emilia Fox, respectively).

I really enjoyed this book.  Christopher was just too pure for the world, and I wanted to hug him, but he would have hated that.  Christoper is an autistic boy who finds the neighbor's dog murdered.  Initially he is blamed for it because he's found at the scene of the crime cradling the dog.  Christopher is then determined to act as a detective like Sherlock Holmes and discover who killed poor Wellington the dog.

This book is told in the first person, which usually makes me cringe and stop reading; however, it was so beautifully written that I feel as though I got a chance to see the thinking process of an autistic person first hand.  It was very fascinating to see how his thought process worked; how he saw and interacted the world and the people around him.

In the middle searching for the killer, Christopher uncovers an entirely different mystery regarding his family.  His dad has been lying to him and throws his world into a tailspin.

This book is funny and engaging and gives a small bit of insight into the life of a person with autism, and being the parent of a child with autism.

This has been on my TBR for ages and I'm using it for: