I’ve just finished the Testament book by Margaret Atwood and I liked it. I like anti-utopia books in general and that’s one of them. During the reading, I realized that it’s the second book in the series. However, you could enjoy it even without reading the first book (The Handmaid’s Tale).
The plot of the book is about the United States tore apart by religious cult resembled medieval Christianity with women sitting at home and men doing some important things in their closed cabinets. A new country is called Gilead (which looks like an ad to a biotech company). There is also a problem with childbirth in that country and they invented Handmaids, professional women to carry and deliver babies for families having issues in this field.
This new reality is very carefully depicted in the book, the way society works, what clothes do they wear and so on, but overall it’s an isolated society with ongoing shortages in food, goods, and people fleeing to neighboring Canada. Looks like North Korea or Soviet Union in the past.
The end of the book is a little bit weird. Head of the Nunn community, Aunt Lydia all her life was against the regime and collected kompromat about the country leaders. She lured an icon of the country, baby Nicole to Gilead to put these sensitive materials under her skin and send them back to Canada. When Canadian media got this information a lot of scandals happened and Gilead somehow failed. Can’t Lydia just send her message in any other way and much early? Looks like the author left lots of questions unanswered to write another book.
What I did like was an extremely easy language. I didn’t even bother to look at the dictionary during the reading, because a few unknown words could be understood out of context.
A curious thing happened with AMC library where I got this book. I borrowed it for 21 days. But it took me much longer to finish it. And it was available to me all that time. I thought that’s because my Kindle reader is offline. But even after I took a new book and synced my device it is still available for reading.