A instant dystopian classic. The Handmaid’s Tale is thought-provoking, terrifying, and keeps the reader asking What if? A scary tale on how women is perceived in a society where the "I" is decided by "others" since the first breathe and the dangers of control, stereotyping and role incredulity. ( )

Quite frankly, one of the most disturbing pieces of fiction I have ever read. I'd hazard to say that nearly every woman who want to know the value of her body outside of her own dreams and desires should read this book. ( )

This was my third reading of The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, and it gets better and more powerful each time I read it. In my opinion, it is one of the finest novels ever crafted, and the two last paragraphs of the story itself (excluding the conference scene at the end) are my favourite ending of any book I've ever read.

I read this novel first in a course I took at the University of Toronto. Assigned readings can be ghastly, and I had recently struggled with Atwood's novel Surfacing, so it was a wonderful surprise to find The Handmaid's Tale so compulsively readable, so terrible in its scope, so dystopian, so intelligent. I ran out of adjectives to describe how much I liked the book the first time around. It was not the first dystopian novel I had read; years earlier, in high school, there had been John Wyndham's The Chrysalids, but it was certainly early on in my discovery of post-apocalyptic fiction, and certainly a major stepping-stone on the path that has made me a great fan of the genre.

I started my second re-read of the novel a few days ago, during the 2020 US federal election, and it struck me, sadly, how much of this book would be possible if Trump were re-elected and if he and the Christian right-wing of the Republican party were able to curtail female reproductive rights as they threatened to do. It is with great relief to know that Trump was defeated by Joe Biden, but still, the coronavirus continues to devastate the US and is uncomfortably common here in Canada, even in the city where I live, and it has felt like the end of the world. Those days in March when the world shut down, became quiet, where cars going down the street were an exception to the rule, it has felt like the end of everything. So it was a wiser and more frightened, and much older me that read this book, not that much-younger woman who was embracing her coursework and her children and her lovers with such enthusiasm and the sense of invincibility that all of us lose, sadly.

This book review is more biographical than it is topical. I apologize. When I picked up this book this morning, a hundred pages from the end, I thought that I would read for an hour and then have a busy day. Then my father had a heart attack and then a stroke, and so I read the book to numb myself as I waited for news. Offred's longing for her husband, Luke, brought me to places where I had the capacity to wonder what my world would be like without the father who square-danced with me in Kentucky, and played in the waves with me in South Carolina, and rescued me from river rapids in Virginia.

I needed this book today and this week. As I write, my father is still breathing, and may yet live through the night. I do not know whether he will step into light or into darkness, but I know I loved re-reading this book, one of my favourites, and it helped me cope with a week and a day filled with uncertainty. ( )

Fine social and psychological study. Good writing, compelling story. Worryingly believable. It makes you stop and think about giving your rights for granted. It also describes well how values and feelings are influenced by the context and how human beings adaptation skills may become a mixed blessing, when the environment you learn to adapt to is hell. It only missed the fifth star because it did not blow me completely off my shoes. However, big standing ovation to the ending and Historical Notes (they were more chilling to me than all the preceding horrors. It must have been the lightheartedness) and to the absence of heroic redeeming deeds as plot-resolution device.
Teen feet over the other dystopian novels in the same vein.
Should be read in schools all over the planet. ( )

I first read The Handmaid's Talein about 1990 I think. I would have been around 18, in my first year of uni. I've been wary of re-reading it because I remember being so blown away by it. I was scared that this amazing, brilliant, intelligent and thoroughly unnerving book wouldn't stand up to the decades. My fears were groundless. Margaret Atwood's depiction of a theocratic dictatorship, where a woman's value is determined by her sexual conduct and capacity to breed, as is beautifully written and as scary as it ever was. ( )