Title: THE TESTAMENTS
Author: Margaret Atwood
Read: May 2020
Read: May 2020
Expected publication: out now
My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟
"You don't believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it
falls on you."
My musings:
There isn't really anything I can say that hasn't been said already in any of the 18,000 or so reviews on Goodreads of Margaret Atwood's highly anticipated
sequel to THE HANDMAID'S TALE, so I will keep it short and sweet. I
fall into camp "really enjoyed it". Whilst THE TESTAMENTS may not
have packed the same punch as its predecessor, I thoroughly enjoyed learning
more about the origins of Gilead and the fate of baby Nicole. I especially
appreciated hearing from Aunt Lydia's POV, having found her to be one of the
most intriguing characters in the TV adaption of THE HANDMAID'S TALE. It was
fascinating to see how society could suddenly disintegrate into the nightmarish
Gilead scene, though watching the news these days nothing really surprises me
any more.
Whilst I did not enjoy the teenage voices as much as Aunt Lydia's, Atwood does a great job in pointing out the contrast between the two worlds - Gilead and Canada - through the differing POVs of her two young characters.
Summary:
All in all, after feeling very skeptical about how anything could possibly ever live up to a literary masterpiece like THE HANDMAID'S TALE, I was pleasantly surprised about how much I did end up enjoying it. Yes, maybe it is now as powerful or literary as its predecessor, but it made for quite compelling reading, further enhanced by an excellent audiobook narration by various narrators, including Ann Dowd as the original voice of Aunt Lydia. If you go into this one without expectations and judge it on its own merit you will probably get a lot more enjoyment out of it than constantly drawing comparisons to its prequel.
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