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A fitting amuse bouche to ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ (in it’s various incarnations)

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

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The Testaments is the hotly anticipated sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, told by Atwood through the voices of three women intimately acquainted with the Gilead regime. It aims to answer the lingering question that many readers had after The Handmaid’s Tale – what brought about the oppressive regime’s collapse? Many words have been written here and all over the internet about this sequel. Was it needed? Is it just a cash-grab? My opinion on the ‘necessity’ of The Testaments is that it is an amuse bouche to both The Handmaid’s Tale book and television series. Both the paper and on-screen […]

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10/29/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:21 |

Blessed Be The Fruit of Margaret Atwood’s Mind

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

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Oh boy, where to begin. I read The Handmaid’s Tale for the first time two years ago and I was terrified.  I agree with the many think pieces on how the timing was right for a resurgence, what with the creeping anti-abortion laws in the southern States.  Despite this, I always thought that Canada was beyond the American abortion debate but the last two years suggest otherwise: Alberta elected an anti-abortion Premier (Jason Kenny) and the leader of our official Opposition Party (Andrew Scheer) is also anti-abortion.  I digress from my book review, but the point I want to make […]

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10/24/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:46 |

No books were harmed, this time

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

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I was 16 when I read The Handmaid’s Tale and I was just beginning my love affair with dystopian tales. I don’t think I liked bleak stories all that much growing up, but man, as soon as I read Fahrenheit 451 they were all I wanted. Give me some of that sweet, sweet harrowing future straight to the veins, and anything like it. When a friend gifted me The Handmaid’s Tale, I thought I’d love it. I read it voraciously, in about two days, and then, enraged, threw it against a wall. If you know the end of that book, […]

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10/7/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:24 |

Satisfying Follow-Up

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

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BINGO: Pajiba Best for: Those who have read (or watched) The Handmaid’s Tale. In a nutshell: We know that Gilead eventually fell. But how? Worth quoting: “The truth can cause a lot of trouble for those who are not supposed to know it.” “Another girl’s disgrace could rub off on you if you got too close to it.” “They said calm things like ‘You need to be strong.’ They were trying to make things better. But it can put a lot of pressure on a person to be told they need to be strong.” Why I chose it: I read […]

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10/2/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:39 |

Under His Eye

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

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Aww. This was so good. I think Atwood did a wonderful job of showing us how Gilead came to be, how it was for those who lived there, and how it looked to others from the outside. Instead of staying with one POV throughout the story, Atwood allows us to to get fully immerse in Gilead via the POVs of a young girl named Agnes, an older girl named Daisy, and the fearsome Aunt Lydia. The character development works for these three characters as well as the secondary characters such as Becka, the other Aunts, and the loathsome Commander Judd. […]

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9/16/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:224 |

“The truth can cause a lot of trouble for those who are not supposed to know it.”

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

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Bingo square: History/Schmistory (as in alternate history, given that – as with The Handmaid’s Tale – the book ends with historical notes from a symposium about Gilead in the year 2197). Set more than 15 years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments is told by three different narrators. There is the familiar Aunt Lydia who we saw through Offred’s eyes in the previous book; a young girl named Daisy living in Canada and unaware of her ties to Gilead; and Agnes, one of the first generation to grow up under this regime. Each are giving their own […]

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9/15/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:41 |

For she will surely need it.

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

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This will mostly be a spoiler-free review, unless you haven’t read The Handmaid’s Tale. So to say that I wasn’t looking forward to this book at all is to undersell how unnecessary I felt like this book was going to be. I have some significant issues with the television show because for me, it sheds light on what felt like purposeful shadow within which the original novel kept the narrative. The original novel was a collection of found tapes secreted away and found later, now being studied by a collective of historians at a conference. We are witness to Offred’s […]

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9/11/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:511 |

Not Quite a Worthy Sequel, But Still Good

The Testaments: The Sequel to The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

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First, let me say that I devoured this book in one day. No matter it’s faults, and it does have them, this is obviously an extremely propulsive book. I couldn’t put it down. Despite it being a giant hardcover, I was carrying it with me everywhere around the house, even when it was inconvenient and even uncomfortable to do so. It’s been a long time since I spent hours doing nothing but just reading, but I spent basically a day reading this and the new Becky Chambers (To Be Taught, If Fortunate). This is, as is obvious from the title […]

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Share the post "Not Quite a Worthy Sequel, But Still Good"

9/10/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:18 |


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