Book Awards Reading Challenge

Title: The Handmaid’s Tale
Author: Margaret Atwood
ISBN: 0770428207
Publisher: Seal Books
Genre: Fiction/388 pages


The Handmaid’s Tale is my first book by Atwood. It kept lingering in my mind long time after I finished reading it. It follows in the footsteps of Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty Four creating a cold fear in the heart by imagining it to be true.

As the title conveys, it is a story of a handmaid, Offred in an imaginary place called Gilead, which was previously known as the USA. Every month on a day called the ceremony, she has to lie on her back in the bed of commander and his wife and pray for him to make her pregnant. In that bed, all three lay together, the wife holding her hands and commander doing the needful. She keeps staring at the roof while the ritual is being performed. Handmaids are valued only because of what they can provide via their wombs.

She is allowed a walk once a day to the market along with another handmaid in the neighbourhood. She keeps thinking of her husband, Luke, her daughter, her best friend, Moira and her mother. She has nothing to record her thoughts as reading and writing is forbidden for females. She keeps all those in her mind wishing to write those down some day. Does she escape? Only time will tell.

To read more, click The Handmaid's Tale on My Own Little Reading Room.