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Tabitha entertains Agnes with stories, including a fantastical story of rescuing Agnes from a castle and running away with her through the woods.
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Agnes is the privileged daughter of a Commander and his wife Tabitha, and while Agnes’s relationship with her father is formal and distant, she and Tabitha have a loving, tightly bonded connection. The second narrator is Agnes Jemima, whom we first meet as a young school girl. Is she only about her own survival? Or is she playing a very long game, establishing her own power base in her own domain with the goal of bringing down Gilead from within? And if the latter is true, how could she stomach all that she had to do to gain and retain her power? She’s a perplexing character, clearly able to be quite cruel and manipulative and deadly… yet she does save girls from terrible situations as well, and finds her own sly and subtle ways to get back at the Commanders who wrong her and other women. Lydia opted for self-preservation - although it’s left ambiguous as to what her true motivation is. When the forces of Gilead came to power, Aunt Lydia and her colleagues were rounded up, imprisoned, and tortured, until they either agreed to work for Gilead or were executed. Prior to Gilead, Aunt Lydia was a well-respected and well-established judge. Her backstory is fascinating - and, it’s worth noting, substantially different than that of the Aunt Lydia character in the Hulu version. Here, we hear Aunt Lydia telling her own story, and we see a much more complex take on who she is and how she came to be this way. We’ve known her up to now as one of the system’s enforcers, one of the Aunts whose job it is to train Handmaids and keep them in line through whatever means necessary.
ADDITIONAL BOOKS BETWEEN THE TESTAMENTS TV
In this new novel, the story is told through three different narrators’ first-person story.įirst, and probably most familiar to both readers and viewers of the TV series, is Aunt Lydia. Gilead continues on, still in power, still subjecting its women to its caste system and degradations, at war with Canada and battling to take down the resistance group Mayday. In The Testaments, years have passed since the end of The Handmaid’s Tale. No reading! Reading was considered such a sin for women that all public signs were replaced with pictures - a drawing of food to denote a store, rather than letters spelling out words. Women’s rights were gone absolutely - no ownership, no money, no independence. Gilead was not much kinder to the Commanders’ wives, who were expected to know their places and stay there. Through ritualized rape, Handmaids endured their roles as vessels and chattel belonging to the Commanders and their wives - or faced gruesome punishments, including mutilation and death. In a world in which fertility rates had fallen drastically, one of Gilead’s prime commandments was procreation by whatever means necessary, including the forced servitude of fertile women as Handmaids, women forced to conceive and carry babies that they’d have no claim to. In it, Margaret Atwood imagined the nation of Gilead, an autocratic theocracy created through the violent overthrow of the United States government. When The Handmaid’s Tale was published in 1985, it was both revolutionary and revelatory. It feels impossible to talk about The Testaments without referencing both.
ADDITIONAL BOOKS BETWEEN THE TESTAMENTS SERIES
Note: Spoilers for The Handmaid’s Tale book and Hulu TV series are mentioned in this review, although not in great detail. Well, almost everything! The other inspiration is the world we’ve been living in.” –Margaret Atwood “Dear Readers: Everything you’ve ever asked me about Gilead and its inner workings is the inspiration for this book. Margaret Atwood’s sequel picks up the story more than fifteen years after Offred stepped into the unknown, with the explosive testaments of three female narrators from Gilead.
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When the van door slammed on Offred’s future at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, readers had no way of telling what lay ahead for her–freedom, prison or death. In this brilliant sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, acclaimed author Margaret Atwood answers the questions that have tantalized readers for decades.