Book #10: The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I was looking forward to reading Margaret Atwood's Booker Prize-winning sequel to the Handmaid's Tale, and it definitely lived up to expectations.
The book has multiple narrators, and you have to pay close attention to who is speaking, but eventually you get used to this, and the pictures that appear at the start of each chapter (and text) help to give you clues.
The three narrators are:
1) Aunt Lydia (her narrative is referred to as "The Ardua Hall Holograph");
2) Agnes, a teenage girl (her narrative is referred to as "Transcript of Witness Testimony 369A"; and
3) Daisy, a second teenage girl (her narrative is reffered to as "Transcript of Witness Testimony 369B").
So, all three stories end up as separate, but eventually diverge, and talk of different aspects of the Dystopian regime, but this book features apparent terrorist attacks that inflict tragedies upon Agnes and Daisy quite early on.
Aside from Aunt Lydia, there did not appear to be a large number of characters from the original book, apart from the obnoxious Commander Judd. I most enjoyed reading about Aunt Lydia, whose character felt like it developed a lot, mostly because of the lengths she would go to, to get her own way.
The book also expanded on the dystopian morals some more; it introduced a gruesome form of execution inflicted on men, where several of the "handmaids" tore them apart (in the book, it is used to punish a rapist).
It felt like a book where you had to really pay close attention to everything that is being said, but I didn't find it that difficult. I have never seen the TV series, "The Handmaid's Tale", but I'd be interested to see how similar that is to the plot in the novels.
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