Dystopian Females

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

This has been on my kindle for a while, which leads me to believe it has been on my to-read list for a while. Admittedly, the thing that finally got me to read this is the series on Hulu. The series looks great, I wish I felt the same about the book.

Taking place in Gilead, a United States city in the future, this is narrated by Offred, a handmaid. It's a weird society. Women have no rights whatsoever, and their role is apparent based on the clothes they wear. If they are a wife, it's blue. Handmaids wear red. Aunts wear brown. Marthas wear green. Unwomen wear grey.

As if that weren't weird enough, the whole purpose of the handmaid is to get pregnant and supply a wife with a baby. In this case, Offred is placed in the house of a Commander and his wife. They are older, which can be determined because the author mentions the white hair and wrinkles. Obviously, they aren't having children of their own at their age. It is Offred's job to have sex once a month with this old guy until she becomes pregnant, so that his wife can take and raise the baby. Weird, right?

Even weirder is the fact that the Commander starts summoning, if you will, Offred to his study late at night to play Scrabble. He gets a hold of forbidden materials that he then allows Offred to use. He's buttering her up, but for what? Dude smuggles her out of the house, more or less, dressed like a hussy, to take her to this club where he can have sex with her outside of the confines of their society. Oddly enough, this little outing comes the same night that the Wife has arranged for Offred to have sex with the hot male servant so she can get pregnant because even she realizes it won't be happening with the Commander.

I wish I could say I enjoyed this book. I like dystopian books, to an extent, but I just didn't like this one. For one, there are a lot of flashbacks and time jumps that happen randomly. This made it hard to keep things straight. Also, the lack of punctuation didn't help matters any. It was sometimes hard to discern when people were talking. I will still watch the Hulu series though, as it looks a lot better than the book turned out to be.