I must be honest here and say I never read The Handmaid's Tale. I did watch the first season of the show on Hulu. I didn't feel like I was lost reading this and don't feel like I would have been even if I hadn't seen the show. I don't know if having read the first book would have added to this but the story is told in three voices and none are part of the first book. I read it because it is the bookclub book at work and I am glad it was because I probably wouldn't have read it otherwise and it was something!
In the Q&A in the back of the book Atwood says her hope for the readers tis that having read the book we never have to live it. And that is the freaky part of this story, it feels like it is something that on the one hand is so extreme but on the other hand it feels dangerously possible.
This story is told in flashback from three perspectives that intersect.
An "Aunt" is writing a secret book about her role in how she became an "Aunt" in Gilead and her long game to bring it down.
Agnes, a young women who has lived in Gilead her whole life.
Daisy, a young women who finds out she was born in Gilead and smuggled out, she has lived her whole life in Canada.
The questions the story had me asking myself were difficult. What would I do if I was Lydia? Would I have given my life early on to not be part of this horror? How should she be judged for choosing to stay alive and does it make her brave to play the long game she played? Do the small kindnesses she did along the way take away any of the bad she did? Did she make up for it all in the end?
I am looking forward to conversation about this at bookclub, I think it will be quite interesting
(Finished Sept. 25, 2019)
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