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Having recently finished the quite brilliant Oryx and Crake, I went into this one with extremely high hopes. The mixed reviews on GR did nothing to deter me and I eagerly dived in...

Following a war, which is based on religion, women are demoted to second class citizens with much fewer rights than men. Offred (we never discover her real name) was ripped from her husband and daughter to serve as a handmaid for a commander and his wife. These handmaids, who have had at least 1 healthy child and are in a non first-marriage relationship, exist solely to carry a child for these commanders. This concept is taken literally from a bible extract so may not seem as strange as first appears. In the world of this novel, infertility is a huge problem and this created a need for young, fertile women to serve wealthy men.

The first thing you notice about this novel is the writing. Atwood is a compelling storyteller and you will often have to stop and just think about what she is trying to convey. The writing itself also depicts Offred's extreme boredom with life and she often goes off on tangents during the novel, akin to daydreaming I imagined. The lack of quotation marks is a bit jarring at first but you quickly get used to it. I'm sure Atwood was trying to make a point by excluding quotation marks, namely that the spoken word is less important in this world.

The concept in itself is probably realistic but I can't imagine that the timeframe described in the novel is wholly accurate: would it really only take a few years for women to lose all their rights and for this to be accepted as the norm? I wouldn't have thought so. I would also have liked a bit more information on what the rest of the world was like. Sure, we get a small part of the novel in which Asian tourists visit and stare at the handmaids, but this is really the only reference to the outside world.

Despite some minor flaws, I could not recommend this book highly enough. You will find yourself lapping up Atwood's writing and it is an emotionally challenging (but rewarding) book to read. Don't expect a clear-cut, everyone-gets-what-they-want sort of ending however, in keeping with her usual style, Atwood leaves this one on a huge cliffhanger.