One of these day's I would love to meet the person who gets to decide what gets written on the back of a book, and I would love to ask them,
"Do you ever actually read the book before you write the blurb on the back?"
For Handmaid's Tail it is abundantly clear that despite the enormous success of the book, and that school children the length and breadth of the UK have read it... the man in charge of the blurb has quite clearly not bothered himself! EIther that or I totally didn't get the book... and in this case I feel fairly confident it wasn't me!
The book was very interesting and it is clear why it is studied in school. It reminds me a lot of a book I read last year called "the Wave" and a documentary produced in the States years ago, called "A Class Divided". In each of these you see how easy it is to get drawn into something that then spirals out of control and that then leads to you losing your previous way of life. Where Attwood takes it further in a Handmaid's Tail, is by truly expressing and demonstrating the utter futility of it all, and how no matter what you try there is absolutely no way out.
That's not to say that the book was perfect - yes I loved the story, but it left me with far too many questions. I like a novel to have a certain clarity to it, and one of the things I hated in English at school was the second guessing as to exactly what the author meant by choosing the words she did.
As the final line of the book states:
"Are there any questions?"
My response is yes, many!! Attwood unfortunately leaves me with too many unknowns. To some that may be fine, to me however it lets down what could have been an excellent book.
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