This incredible book is a sequel to the Handmaid's Tale, a book about Ofred a Handmaid who lived in a Commander's house. She worked at providing him and his wife with a child. Ofred had had enough and grabbed at the opportunity to escape to Canada. This book is told through three voices: Aunt Lydia one of the founders and very old; Agnes a ten=yesar-old child who grows up in Gilead in a Commander's house; and Daisy a fifteen-year-old who grew up in free Toronto.
Daisy\s parents Melanie and Nick get blown up after Daisy goes against their orders and goes to a rally that is televised and winds up on television. But that's not the only thing that got them blown up. The Pearl Girls missionaries spotted them. They should have run sooner, but they didn't. So Ava and Elija, their friends tell Daisy that that is not her name that she is actually baby Nicole the famous baby both sides have been contesting over for years. A Handmaid escaped over the border with her child. Ava wants Daisy to go into Gilead as a Pearl Girl recruit because their Source wants her too. Could it be a trap? Yes, it could. But it's one they're willing to take.
Agnes starts out as a ten-year-old girl whose mother tells her stories of picking her our of a group of children. She will find out from the cruel girls at school that her mother was a free woman who was turned into a Handmaid, or a slut. She has to deal with the kids at school and the mercurial feelings add depending on her social standing as her father has remarried upon the death of his wife and gotten a Handmaid. At the age of thirteen,her stepmother wants to get rod pf jer and puts her up on the marriage market. Her stepmother has pushed her into marrying Commander Judd, who works with Aunt Lydia and goes through wives. Agnes is despairing marrying him until Aunt Lydia intervenes and asks if she has felt a calling to become an Aunt. She says she has and eagerly joins.
Aunt Lydia was a judge before everything went to hell. She was single with no children and middle-aged, around 53, when she was taken to a stadium along with other professional women who were of the same age, but separated by profession. At night they were placed in the locker rooms, but first, two rows of women were blindfolded and brought forth to the center of the field and on the first-day men killed them. But on the following days, women killed them dressed in brown dresses. As more people are added, some people are taken away. Eventually, Lydia is taken away to be before Commander Judd. In today's time, Aunt Lydia is you're pretty sure the Source, but is she set them up.
This book was ten times better than Handmaid's Tale. You ger is so attached to the characters. There's Aunt Lydia reminds me of Maggie Smith from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to Downtown Abbey. And Agnes who has more strength than she realizes she has. ANd Diasywho finds herself asking for help for the first time in her life. This was a powerful book that concludes the story of The Handmaid's Tale one way or the other and its a helluva ending. I really loved this book and I give it five out of five stars.
Quotes
“Life is not about hair,” I said then, only half
jocularly. Which is true, but it is also true that hair is about life. It is
the flame of the body’s candle, and as it dwindles the body shrinks and melts
away I oncer had enough hair for a topknot, in the days of topknots, for a bun
in the age of buns. But now my hair is
like out meals here at Ardua Hall: sparse and short. The flame of my life is subsiding, more
slowly than some of those around me might like, but faster than they may
realize.
-Margaret Atwood (The Testaments p 31)
I regard my reflection. The inventor of the mirror did
few of us any favors, we must have been happier before we knew what we looked
like.
-Margret Atwood (The Testaments p 31)
Right now I still have some choice in the matter. Now
whether to die, but when and how. Isn’t that freedom of a sort? Oh, and who to
take down with me. I have made my list.
-Margaret Atwood (The Testaments p 32)
I was the age in which parents suddenly transform from
people who know everything into people who know nothing.
-Margaret Atwood (The Testaments p44)
Only an idiot would have believed this, so I did.
-Margaret Atwood (The Testaments p 48)
Sorry solves nothing.
-Margaret Atwood (The Testaments p 145)
Reading was not for girls: only men were strong
enough to deal with the force of it,; and the Aunts, of course, because they
weren’t like us.
-Margaret Atwood (The Testaments p 156)
Wedlock: it had a dull metallic sound, like an iron door
clicking shut.
-Margaret Atwood (The Testaments p 158) Where there is an emptiness, the mind will obligingly fill it up. Fear is always at hand to supply any vacancies, as is curiosity. I have had ample experience with both.
-Margaret Atwood (The Testaments p 238)
But it’s difficult to be grateful for the absence of an unknown quantity. I’m afraid we did not fully appreciate the extent to which those of Aunt Lydia’s generation had been hardened in the fire. They had a ruthlessness about them that we lacked.
-Margaret Atwood (The Testaments p 288)
“But why did she do it?” I asked. “Did she want to die?” “No one wants to di,” said Becka. “But some people don’t want to live in any of the ways that are allowed.”
-Margaret Atwood (The Testaments p 293-4)
The truth was not noble, it was horrible. This was what the Aunts meant, then, when they said women’s minds were too weak for reading. We could crumble, we would fall apart under the contradictions, we would not be able to hold firm.
-Margaret Atwood (The Testaments p 303)
I feared I might lose my faith. If you’ve never had a faith, you will not understand what that means. You feel as if your best friends is dying; that everything that defined you is being burned away’ that you’ll be left all alone. You feel exiled, as if you are lost in a dark wood. It was like the feeling I’d had when Tabitha died; the world was emptying itself of meaning. Everything was hollow. Everything was withering.
-Margaret Atwood (The Testaments p 303)
The truth can cause a lot of trouble for those who are not supposed to know it.
-Margaret Atwood (The Testaments p 307)
Torture is like dancing. I’m too old for it. Let the younger one practice their bravery.
-Margaret Atwood (The Testaments p 404)
In my end is my beginning, as someone once said. Who was that? Mary, Queen of Scots, if history does not lie.
-Margaret Atwood (The Testaments p 404)
A bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter. Love is as strong as death.
-Margaret Atwood (The Testaments p 415)
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