REVIEW: The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)
Author: Margaret Atwood
My rating: 3/5.
Premise: The Republic of Gilead offers Offred only one option: to breed. If she deviates, she will, like all dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a repressive stats cannot obliterate desire - neither Offred's nor that of the two mean on which her future hangs.
[⚠️CW: oppression of women, public hanging]
I'd always heard of this book and meant to read it, but I didn't really know what it was about (for some reason, I thought it was historical fiction). I loved the concept and the whole dystopian world that was created. But I found the book a tad slow and lacking - maybe I'd built it up beforehand, or maybe I wasn't in the right frame of mind. I found the plot meandered through present day, random flashbacks to various points in her life and random trains of thoughts. I loved the ambiguity of the ending (although the strange "historical note" detracted some of that) but I wanted to know more about the world and what happened. So a good idea with interesting themes to explore, just didn't live up to my expectations!