This was a good book, but like the last book I read, it left me wanting more. The ending seemed so unfinished, but I can see why the author ended the book where she did (read more below if you’d like).
It is interesting to compare this book and The Children of Men. Both deal with people trying to get pregnant because somehow there is an infertility problem. Unlike with The Children of Men, some women in The Handmaid’s Tale can get pregnant but sometimes those babies end up being deformed in some way.
Both also deal with a government that is totalitarian to some degree. In The Handmaid’s Tale, they control who does what – they test women to see who can get pregnant – they decide who can get pregnant – they decide who even gets to have sex and with whom. Women basically have no freedom in this book. A character in the book said that things are the way they are now because their culture was dying because they had too many choices, so they took away all the choices women had (most of them anyway).
It makes me wonder if infertility were a huge crisis, what would happen. I don’t think it would go to the extent described in these two books, but how far would people go to make it so humans continue to live? One review of the book I read was that this world wasn’t too far off because so many of the religious right are getting their say on how things are run and whether there will be any choices for women to make because there will be more challenges on abortion and the ability to get the morning after pill or even birth control pills. Hmm, it shouldn’t surprise me that there is a book (probably several) on this very subject. Huh – this is rather scary – it sounds an awful lot like the world that Margaret Atwood wrote in this book.
Anyway, it was a good book and one that I would recommend.
The book does read as if it is a journal of some sort, but we learn at the end of the book that some historians found tapes of a person speaking of her time as a handmaid around 200+ years later. It makes sense then it ended as it did because it was a journal of sorts and maybe the handmaid couldn’t come back to tell more. Still, I wish there could have been more because we don’t know what happens to her or any of the other characters. I suppose that’s just how things are when reading about history – there will always be questions you’ll never get the answers to.
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