I am very behind the curve on The Handmaid’s Tale. I haven’t seen any of the TV show, but I finally read the book.

My rating: 3.5 stars

Margaret Atwood writes beautiful prose. There were paragraphs that made me want to go back and read them over and over, just for the pure pleasure of the way her words flowed. She is truly an artist with language and she is very good at setting a scene and building tension into a story. I also really liked how Atwood built on existing US culture and religion to create a story that’s extreme, but not entirely unbelievable as a post-apocalyptic world.

3.5 stars because once the novelty wore off, I had a hard time getting into the story. I didn’t care about any of the characters or what happened to them and there’s so much left unsaid and open to the reader’s interpretation, that I found the ending very unsatisfying. It’s also a pretty dark and depressing read most of the time, so not one I’d want to read again.