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.
I'll second that. If it hadn't been on the required list, I wouldn't have read it. There were some massive plot holes that made absolutely no sense, chiefly, how do you get the first generation of handmaids from an educated populace? No reasonable person would have volunteered for that or allowed their wife, sister, or daughter to be taken.
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.
I'll second that. If it hadn't been on the required list, I wouldn't have read it. There were some massive plot holes that made absolutely no sense, chiefly, how do you get the first generation of handmaids from an educated populace? No reasonable person would have volunteered for that or allowed their wife, sister, or daughter to be taken.