I haven't seen the show, but the book was on a required reading list in high school. The whole premise is that women worldwide are afflicted with sterility. Fertile women become second class citizens, effectively property. The wealthy elites trade the handmaids, who are indoctrinated from an early age to accept this as right and proper, and are kept illiterate so they never discover the truth. That's all I can remember. It was almost 15 years ago that I read it.
The book itself wasn't very good. Some of the features of Gilead (the totalitarian regime the MC lived under) were half-baked, but the author did understand totalitarian regimes better than the average person would, which made it somewhat interesting to read. You can get the same insight about totalitarian regimes from other dystopian novels like Brave New World and 1984 though. Don't bother with A Handmaid's Tale honestly.
Show? I was talking about a book. I do know the movie you're talking about though.
Haven't actually consumed either. Watched enough of the show to realize it was straight propaganda. Was the book as bad?
I haven't seen the show, but the book was on a required reading list in high school. The whole premise is that women worldwide are afflicted with sterility. Fertile women become second class citizens, effectively property. The wealthy elites trade the handmaids, who are indoctrinated from an early age to accept this as right and proper, and are kept illiterate so they never discover the truth. That's all I can remember. It was almost 15 years ago that I read it.
Still sounds like tripe.
Well, it was written by a RadFem lol
The book itself wasn't very good. Some of the features of Gilead (the totalitarian regime the MC lived under) were half-baked, but the author did understand totalitarian regimes better than the average person would, which made it somewhat interesting to read. You can get the same insight about totalitarian regimes from other dystopian novels like Brave New World and 1984 though. Don't bother with A Handmaid's Tale honestly.
The book was an allusion to the Iranian theocracy.
No, it was Margaret Atwood, Canadian Leftist, raging at Reagan and "Moral Majority" Evangelicals in the 80s.
Margaret Atwood's anti-Reagan screed became a movie and them a Hulu series.