A few years ago I read an entire book before realizing I had already read it. I looked back at my Goodreads read list and realized I had no memory of about half of the books on there. So I built a new habit – (almost) every time I finish a book, I word-vomit my thoughts and emotions into a note on my phone. Sometimes they’re brief, sometimes they’re long-longwinded, sometimes they just ramble…and now I’m putting them here. Please enjoy the madness.
SPOILERS AHEAD…
I liked this book but I don’t love it like the Handmaids Tale. It’s interesting reading it now that there is already a TV show that had reached beyond the end of the first book. And I like that this one takes place almost a decade after the first so that it has room to create its own story without creating conflict with the TV show. We don’t know what happens to June aside from the fact that she makes it out of Gilead but is not united with her daughters until they are in both their twenties. Once again I think it’s interesting that the story was told from the perspective of historians studying Gilead and discovering pieces of the past. I know that a theme of the first novel was supposed to be the untrustworthiness of the tapes coming from a Handmaids without much ability to fact check. They made this conclusion even easier to reach by spending the last section outright stating that most of what was in the book could be forgery.
I think this book lacked some of the subtlety of the first and played a little further into cliche than I would have liked with the happy ending and the humanizing redemption of Aunt Lydia. The two younger girls also came across as much less mature than their ages would suggest but maybe that’s an intentional product of the world they’ve grown up in? That being said, Aunt Lydia’s storyline was the one that made me question myself and circumstances the most. As I think is outright stated at some point, it’s easy to think we would do the “right” thing and not become the monster she was in those circumstances but…would we? With the world turned around so much, who would be so ready to die rather than try to find some form of power to live by? I don’t know if I fully buy her storyline though. She seemed to be a “believer” for a long time or at least pretending to be then changing her mind but then not really because she was just biding her time all along? Overall the plot was incredibly predictable (though would it have been without the TV show giving some stuff away? I don’t know) and I’m not a huge fan when a book tries to make a big deal out of a “twist” that was obvious from the start.