Friday 8 February 2013

Book 4 - The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood



This, my fourth book in this year's challenge, has been on my 'to be read' pile for a while and I finally got the opportunity to read it. It tells the harrowing tale of a future gone wrong, a dystopian world where the stuff of nightmares becomes a terrifying reality. The story centres around a woman who is imprisoned inside a high security world where there are armed check points at every corner, where it is illegal to write or speak and where women are used as baby making vessels and moved around like human cattle. It doesn't sound a barrel of laughs and that's because it isn't and it isn't meant to be either. With echoes of cold war communism and religious fanaticism, The Handmaid's Tale is a bleak and uncompromising look at what would happen if the human race fell down a cesspool of it's own engineering.

Although this book is dark and disturbing it is brilliantly and beautifully written and Margaret Atwood creates a stunningly real world that I well and truly believed in. Each page is filled with unbelievably good prose and try as I could I could not think of one good reason why I shouldn't give this book a 5/5.

2 comments:

  1. I really enjoyed this book. So many of the 52 in 52 challenge people are reading it this year, maybe I should consider rereading it. :)

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  2. Yes it's my favourite so far this year, thanks for popping along to my blog :)

    Ally

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