A Handmaid's Tale

Recently my wife and I had our second baby boy. He is a delight, and we are all healthy and happy. In other news, I've been trying to create my summer assignment for my students so I've been reading some other excellent books, including "Ghost" by Jason Reynolds, and the graphic novels, "Persepolis" and "American Born Chinese"  So between work and ya know growing my family I may have gotten behind on my reading goal. But I am now back on track, and I am feeling good to continue this year.

PBS launched their "Great American Reads" program this summer. They surveyed people from various backgrounds, locations etc and created a list of 100 great books, you can vote for them at http://www.pbs.org/the-great-american-read/vote/ it's really fun. Anyway, I bring this up because you guessed it, The Handmaid's Tale made the list. Quite frankly, how could it not? Marget Atwood's speculative fiction novel is a masterpiece. I've seen it on lists for years, I knew about the Emmy award-winning show, but I just never read it. Which begs the question...what was I thinking.

I mean this book is great, definitely sad, definitely makes you stop on more than one occasion and reflect on well everything. I mean in a #metoo world that we live it, the themes are very overt, which is fine, they should be. But what makes this book so powerful is Atwood's rich use of language and her slow plodding realistic revelations about how Gilead came to be. What is so jarring is that it doesn't feel fake. It feels real.

However, the most fascinating part to me was Atwood's style, the way she plotted the story, and her word choice was a masterful example of writing. There are so many great lines that show how power structures work.  She was able to create Offread as a fully formed human in a terrible environment. 

All in all, I can see why it would be on every list, and why it is so powerful. This novel does what all great novels get you to do. It makes you think, and process the world around you differently, and makes you stop and consider...are we really that far off from that kind of a world....?