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“The Handmaid’s Tale�� is a book club read of which I had no interest in reading. In fact, I had to resort to SparkNotes to figure out what the heck was going on. For example, the main character is Offred and another is Ofwarren. The names are bizarre until I read the SparkNotes which say that the names of the handmaidens were possessive of their male. So, Fred was the Commander in the house that our main character resided, hence her name: Of(Fred).

Next, Atwood did a terrible job of explaining the world in which Offred found herself. Due to nuclear war and war damage, the birthrate of the country plummeted. Plus, women who did have babies had stillborn or damaged children. The birth defect was at a 25% high. A new regime that was male dominated came in force and puritanical beliefs became rampant.

Atwood does show that for a male dominated society to flourish, there needs to be complicity with some females. The Aunts and the Wives were our main complicit females. Also, females needed to comply for the success.

When Atwood wrote it, feminism was at its first wave, starting its second. Reproductive rights have always been fore front of all feminism. When reproduction is taken away by physical and ambient forces, and reproduction becomes a need for society to flourish, fertile women are seen as only walking uteruses, by both men and the women of high rank who cannot conceive. Those women who are unfertile and not of high social rank are banished.

Some of the themes are interesting, but the story is cumbersome to read. Good literature, to me, is one that has beautiful prose, with interesting themes, that is easy to read. Atwood hits one of the three for me.