The Handmaid's Tale

The Graphic Novel

Graphic novel, 240 pages

Published March 26, 2019

ISBN:
978-0-7710-0684-5
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4 stars (2 reviews)

Everything Handmaids wear is red: the colour of blood, which defines us.

Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, where women are prohibited from holding jobs, reading, and forming friendships. She serves in the household of the Commander and his wife, and under the new social order she has only one purpose: once a month, she must lie on her back and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are valued only if they are fertile. But Offred remembers the years before Gilead, when she was an independent woman who had a job, a family, and a name of her own. Now, her memories and her will to survive are acts of rebellion.

Provocative, startling, prophetic, The Handmaid's Tale has long been a global phenomenon. With this stunning graphic novel adaptation of Margaret Atwood's modern classic, …

1 edition

Review of "The Handmaid's Tale" on 'Storygraph'

3 stars

This is an excellent book. I read the first half in one go and only put it down because it was really late and I had to get up early the next morning. I had trouble sleeping because I couldn't put it out of my mind. I then spent the next day thinking about it. So it's a book that haunts you. However, the second part of the book didn't have the same effect on me. I didn't connect so much with it, and the gut punches weren't as effective.

I still recommend this to everyone, obviously. But it's not an easy read. There was a moment when I had to put the book down and take a couple of minutes before I took it up again (the visit to the doctor, if you're curious) because I was so disgusted by what was happening that I couldn't keep reading. I …

Review of "The Handmaid's Tale" on 'Storygraph'

4 stars

One of the best elements of compelling dystopia is imagining how circumstances might evolve from reality to the fiction at hand. You end up finding the elements that the author believes are dangerous about the real world, or think would sustain an authoritarian system. The Handmaiden's tale is first about women, and how men might respond to a world in which fertility has become a priceless commodity. It's also about how authoritarian regimes sustain themselves, and that I thought was particularly telling and poignant. The state in the Handmaid's tale is not as omnipresent as it is in, say, 1984. It works largely through social hierarchies of control, men ruling a household, women achieving status through the men and regulating the behavior of women beneath them, and finally, through fear, the individuals regulating themselves. I thought the main character's navigating her place at the bottom of the elite hierarchy was …