Title: The Testaments
Author: Margaret Atwood
Genre: Dystopian, Classic. Science Fiction
Published: September 10, 2019
Pages: 422
The Carpenter Confessions Rating: ★★★★.5☆
Margaret Atood wrote a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale called The Testaments. Margarett does it again with an amazing book set into the dystopian world. The world of Gilead is back with a whole new twist. She gives you more of what you loved in The Handmaid’s Tale. She really knows how to keep the bases of a dystopian world and makes it its own. This time, the book is light hearted, more adventurous and being a sequel, it did not disappoint.
The Testaments takes place fifteen years after The Handmaid’s Tale with Gilead on the way to falling apart. Told in three different perspectives, all in first person, this book gives different views of how this futuristic world works. Aunt Lydia, who we already know about from The Handmaid's Tale, is one of the founders of this community and tells of the struggles of trying to keep Gilead afloat while chaos is taking place. She tries to keep everything in order, but one can only do so much by herself and being sick of all that's going on makes it harder to do your job. Agnes, a teenage girl raised into a commander's family, is dreading her future and wants to figure out how she may be able to change it without the consequences that may follow. Finally, there is Daisy, who lives in Canada away from the world of Gilead. She has a past she doesn't know and is forced into Gilead to try and figure out who she really is. With Gilead on the verge of destruction, can these three women do what it takes to finish it or will all stay status quo?
Margaret Atwood does a phenomenal job at creating the same dystopian world while having a completely different storyline and characters. She perfectly portrays how this world is different for each individual, but still has the same negative tendency to this world. At times I have a hard time reading sequels to books I love because you don’t want to be disappointed. This wasn’t the case for me with The Testaments. While so different, it still made me feel I was reading the same series. It is more light hearted than the previous one because I believe it felt targeted towards a younger age group, I still loved it the same.
One thing about The Testaments that was noticeably different than The Handmaid’s Tale was the sense of hope that Gilead was going to change for the better. In this series, women are looked at as not having as much power as the men do, but in The Testaments, it’s women who are making the difference to change the way things are run. The other thing I appreciated about this book was it showed the world of Gilead in all different areas; in the way schools were run, the way the Aunts operate, as well as, the world outside of Gilead. It gave you more than just what goes on inside the household with the POV of a Handmaid.
While I liked this book, I gave it four and a half stars because I felt it could have been more detailed in the world of Gilead and not so focused on the personal lives of the characters. In The Handmaid’s Tale it portrayed more of the characters where The Testaments was the complete opposite. The other thing was I didn’t like Aunt Lydia’s point of view as well as Daisy and Agnes’. It felt less about Gilead and more about her own problems. That being said, I still highly recommend this book if you found yourself like The Handmaid's Tale.
Spoiler Alert!!!!!!
As I got to the end of the book where Agnes and Daisy/Nicole met their mom, there is speculation it is June. This theory makes so much sense to me because at the end of The Handmaid's Tale, June is taken in the van by what is speculated to be the resistance group. If it is June then it made for an excellent end because Margaret makes you question what it might be. It does make me crazy to not actually know who it is and I’m left guessing Anyone else have any thoughts or other conspiracy theories on this book/books?
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