The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

I wasn’t sure what to expect with The Testaments.  What direction would Atwood take the world she had so vividly created in The Handmaid’s Tale?   From almost the first page, I was sucked into this new story and couldn’t stop reading until it was complete.

The story is told from three different viewpoints.  One view point is the diary of Aunt Lydia as she tells of life after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale, but she also flashes back to how she became Aunt Lydia.  It was fascinating.  The second view point was of a young girl named Daisy who is growing up in Canada is a used clothing store.  Her story immediately seemed off to me as she thought of her parents by their first names and never as her parents.  The third view point is of a young girl named Agnes who is growing up in Gilead with her friend Becka.  After Agnes’s mother passes away, she finds herself adrift in her world searching for meaning.  When all three stories collide, the future of Gilead itself will change.

I loved the world that Atwood created and continued.  I especially loved her characters.  Their stories were relatable and unrelatable living in a world that seems plausible and not that far from our own.  The choices they made and the consequences were riveting to think about.  I don’t want to ruin the plot of this book for others so I will not go into detail.  I will say I enjoyed every second of it, especially the ending.

Favorite Quotes:

“Only dead people are allowed to have statues, but I have been given one while still alive.  Already I am petrified.”

“I imagine you expect nothing but horrors, but the reality is that many children were loved and cherished, in Gilead as elsewhere, and many adults were kind through fallible, in Gilead as elsewhere.”

“I don’t remember that school day much, because why would I?  It was normal.  Normal is like looking out a car window.  Things pass by, this and that and this and that, without much significance.  You don’t register such hours; they’re habitual, like brushing your teeth.”

“There was a certain power in it, silence and stillness.”

“Becka said that spelling was not reading:  reading, she said, was when you could hear the words as if they were a song.”

“The aims of Gilead at the outset were pure and noble, we all agree.  But they have been subverted and sullied by he selfish and the power-mad, as so often happens in the course of history.”

Overall, Atwood achieves the impossible by creating a riveting sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale that furthered the story while being an unputdownable story of its own.

Book Source:  The Kewaunee Public Library.  Thank-you!