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When I said before that the inciting incident didn't come until a third of the way into the book, I was wrong. That was a false start. It actually comes halfway through the book. The religiosity of the Reagan era inspired Atwood's dystopia, in which fundamentalist Christians have taken over society. While that premise does give me the heebie-jeebies, Atwood’s taken the idea to a literal extreme to make a point. This ruins the foundation of The Handmaid's Tale because most American fundies would balk at this world. Atwood imagines the extreme of the extreme and in the process completely misunderstands American evangelicalism. Simply because an author wants to comment on society doesn’t mean he or she can ignore important, logical story elements. The logic part should be emphasized here, I think, given this is supposed to be science fiction, not fantasy. ( Although Atwood does insist The Handmaid's Tale is speculative fiction, because that further legitimizes her story...or something? Never mind that sci-fi and fantasy are types of speculative fiction.)

It's told in the first-person narrative, from the POV of Offred, one such fem-slave, whose sole purpose in life is to endure loveless copulation in the hope of successful fertilisation. I have never written a review on The Handmaid's Tale because I love the book, and it is so hard to write about a book you love. She doesn't actually rebel at all, except perhaps in her head. Really, she's coerced into breaking rules by everyone else. This is a medical procedure and pregnancy is a risky condition, it can cause death. Every woman has the right to decide whether or not they want to take that risk. Period.

Every event in the story is seen through Offred’s eyes. Her claustrophobic world, her oppressive routine, everything in her life is fastidiously described in the form of a diary or stream of consciousness: the household, the neighborhood around the house, the people she carefully meets, her room, her dreams, her recollection of how she came to be there… Then, around the middle of the novel, some small changes (often sexually loaded) start to take place and slowly build up until, eventually, her horrific environment starts to crumble. The ending is somewhat abrupt. Move over Bram Stoker. Move over H.P. Lovecraft. Fade away into oblivion, Edgar Allan Poe. Disappear down the depths of obscurity, Stephen King. Your narratives are not nearly as coldly brutal, your premonitions not nearly as portentous. Top 7... Cutesy Characters We Want to Beat the Crap Out of". GamesRadar+. 21 April 2008. Archived from the original on 2012-10-14 . Retrieved 2010-01-05.

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.Set in the not-so-distant future, Offred is designated as a Handmaid. Meaning her fertile womb "allows" her to stay in the house of Fred as his legal consort. She remembers life before servitude and secretly wishes to be valued. "It's only the insides of our bodies that are important." Have you ever heard of Coleridge and the suspension of disbelief? "...a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith." In the majority of cases, we don't even realize we're granting the author and the story our suspension of disbelief. We just believe, because we are prepared to, because we know that if we don't, then reading is no use, especially if what we are dealing with is a fantasy or sci-fi book. Lo and behold, this book made me struggle to grant it my suspension of disbelief. I still have not decided if it was due to the writing, or the story in itself, or something else yet, but that is what happened, and it totally ruined it for me.Atwood chose Massachusetts for its puritanical history. I can embrace the connection to the Reagan administration, in the same way I can embrace Orwell's fear of communism in 1984, but to imagine an unchanging, puritanical Massachusetts requires a bit too much.