BOOK OF THE MONTH
The Handmaid's Tale: A Novel
With terrifying understatement, this novel narrates the life of a college-educated mother ripped from her career and family to be a slave, in a dystopian United States too plausible to be forgotten. Forbidden by a fanatical government to read, choose their own clothes or appear in public alone, handmaids fulfill an awful purpose as the servants of wealthy families. All the while, however, strange new friendships emerge between the powerless and the powerful, as revolution glimmers on the horizon.
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Readers say *The Handmaid’s Tale* is a powerful, chilling dystopian classic with Margaret Atwood’s masterful storytelling and vivid portrayal of total...
I wish I had waited to watch the Hulu series until after finishing the book. I usually read the books first before movie/show...but in this case, the copy was on hold at the library with a few others ahead of me. I let my impatience get the best of me; it was a bad decision. The show is (of course) overdramatized in comparison which just made the novel feel watered down.
Margaret Atwood is a master story teller. I have read several of her books and they differ in style and content, but are all compelling. This is the book chosen for May/June by Emma Watson's Our Shared Shelf book club on Goodreads. The range of books that we have read since the inception of this book club is wonderful and I have read every book and enjoyed them all. The Handmaid's Tale is a chilling look at single minded zeal and totalitarianism and crippling discrimination against women. Let us avoid this at all costs.
Overall, it was a bit slow and dry, but definitely scary. It was a good meditation inspiration about not taking rights and privileges for granted and had a few great passages such as this: "It’s an event, a small defiance of rule, so small as to be undetectable, but such moments are the rewards I hold out for myself, like the candy I hoarded, as a child, at the back of a drawer. Such moments are possibilities, tiny peepholes."
The books is well-written...I just didn't care much for it. Maybe the whole scenario was just too depressing for me.
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