Author Origin: Born in Ottawa, Ontario. Lives in Toronto, Ontario.
Page Count: 415
Genre: Fiction
Difficulty: Medium
Grade Level: 11+
Key Talking Points: Women's rights, the future of our society, corruption, rebellion, the reliability of narrators, the function and success of a sequel.
Sensitive Subject Matter: Sexual content, some mild inappropriate language.
Summary: Set fifteen years after the events of The Handmaid's Tale, The Testaments follows three female narrators as they tell their stories. Each voice starts with some mystery surrounding their identity, but a discerning reader can quickly put the pieces together (especially if listening the audio book, based on the voices of the readers). Two of the narrators are young, having grown up during the oppressive reign, and one is old, able to blend her telling between the early formation of Gilead with how it is in her present. There is also the interesting layer that each story seems to be a recorded testament (hence the name), and the reader is left wondering to what end each character was made to recount this tale. As the story progresses, the narrators' lives intertwine and they work together for the ultimate goal, the downfall of Gilead.
I liked one of the three voices, the older one, a lot more than the other two. Hearing her story, I really felt vindicated as to why I had always felt contradictory emotions regarding her character in the original. All the narrators were strong, in their own way, but this narrator was really a bad-ass. She played the long game, and played it well. The other voices are at first teenagers and then early 20s, and they read very young. Not necessarily a bad thing, but they did make it seem a little more YA than straight fiction.
One of the interesting things about this book is the idea that the narrators are telling their stories, but may not be telling full truths. This is pointed out explicitly in the last chapter of the text. Atwood usually ends her books with a final chapter that goes completely sideways; she either overly explains everything in the text to you, assuming you didn't "get it," or takes the story around an unexpected curve. This text doesn't do either of those things. Instead, it answers the lingering questions and wraps everything up fairly nicely, while still leaving that question of the reliability of the narrators, and, so, the ultimate truth of the text as a whole. Every person has their own motives, things to protect, reasons to lie or tell the truth, and this final chapter introduces just a small kernel of doubt that I enjoyed.
Teacher Note: All of the same themes that you get from The Handmaid's Tale are present in The Testaments, but with a little less difficulty in the reading level. The book works really well for a senior level course that applies literary theories, such as Marxism, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis. Based on the narrator's voices, as mentioned above, I do believe the book lends itself more to a female reader. The text does explain itself as it goes, and so I believe a student could read it who hadn't read The Handmaid's Tale, but I don't think they would get as much out of it. As such, this book could be offered as a CU for a student who had read The Handmaid's Tale for a book club novel, or a core novel, or as a companion novel to the original in some other way.
Final Thought: I still clearly remember the feeling I had while reading The Handmaid's Tale for the first time. Mind. Blown. So I was both excited and cautious when I heard about the sequel, especially coming so many years after the original (and after 3 seasons of the TV show).
Reading this text was like visiting your old school, years later. The world doesn't seem as big and intimidating. Some of the mystery is gone. There are many familiar elements, but they also look a little different with the added lens of time and experience.
The Testaments was, overall, an enjoyable read. It was fast and easy and engaging. But compared to Atwood's other work, it was maybe too fast and too easy. There is something about the original that made me work for it a bit more, that made me uncomfortable, that made me angry. I didn't feel those things with The Testaments. A friend and fellow reader described it as similar to fan-fiction. It felt as though the writing was rushed, that it lacked nuance, that it had more cliche. And it was very predictable. However, for fans of the original, it does give some very satisfying closure.
📚 Ms. CAN Lit
Comments
Post a Comment