![]() And yet, The Testaments largely lacks the power of its predecessor. The plot is propulsive, the characters compelling, the world closely and thoughtfully observed. ![]() It’s a fast-paced yarn featuring a range of classic adventure-novel tropes: mysterious parentage and secret identities spying, friendship, and short-lived teenage romance, capped off with a climactic seafaring adventure. The second half of my book is largely blank, because I’d given myself over to the story. ![]() In a sense, the Handmaids are the teenage girls of Gilead, their sexuality both definitive and taboo. But the novel is most concerned with the lives of the Handmaids, those fertile women whose sexuality makes them a particular target of societal prurience, violence, and control. ![]() In Gilead, categories proliferate: Wives, Handmaids, Marthas, Unwomen, Econowives, Aunts. Even if the categories are oppressive, the clarity of rules can be a kind of relief. Teenagers are often drawn to fantasy worlds in which young people are fed into impervious systems to be classified, labeled, and defined (see: Allegiant, The Hunger Games). Margaret Atwood’s novel imagines a society named Gilead, in which a fertility crisis has led, in short order, to the overthrow of democracy, the rise of a patriarchal theocracy, and a system of oppression in which the country’s few remaining fertile women are farmed out to wealthy couples and forced to bear children for them. ![]()
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