I went into this book with somewhat high expectations. Mostly because I have heard about or seen it everywhere. People talk about The Handmaid’s Tale in movies, on TV, in passing and in other books. I’m actually surprised it took me this long to get to it because it has been a huge buzz everywhere since before I became really serious about reading. I’ve been reading this book for five months. This could possibly add the the reason why this book was not my favorite.

While reading this book I found it extremely difficult to connect with the characters and couldn’t really follow the plot through out. Like I said, I think that some of that can be attributed to the fact that it did take me five months to read it, but at the same time, I did read other things. It’s not like I was busy all the time. I was able to pick up other books because this one didn’t captivate me enough to continue reading. I am currently on winter break from school and I’m trying to finish all of the books that I haven’t really had the motivation to continue reading, that is why I finished this book, not because I was wildly interested in figuring out what was going to happen next.

From the start of the book, I had an idea of what was going to happen to our main character. However, that thing that I predicted that would happen didn’t happen until towards the very end of the book. For those of you who don’t know, I am the worse at guessing things when it comes to plot twists or even just the general plot of a book. If I am able to predict what is going to happen in a book, it was either intended for the reader to infer the plot twist or plot early, or something was missing from the story. To be honest, I’m not quite sure which one it is with this book. I’m left a little bit confused about what the point of the whole story was.
Another thing that really confused me was the end of the book. Does someone want to tell me what happened because I’ve read it over five or six times and I still don’t think that I fully understand what is going on. This might be another result of reading the book over a course of a long time, but all the names of everyone kind of blended together and I’m not quite sure if I understand what happened to whom.

I’ve been told that this story is haunting, that it will make you think about the world that you live in and wonder how close we are to what is happening in this society, I have been told that it will surprising you and that you won’t be able to put it down. Maybe my expectations were too high. Maybe I should have read it over a shorter time span. Maybe I should have read it with a group of people so that I could analyze what was going on in the book. All of these could be possibilities, but in the end, I didn’t really enjoy this book as much as I had hoped that I would. I’m giving this book three stars because I do think that there were many factors that could have been avoided that aided me in not having a better experience with this book. However, I’m not quite sure if I would have enjoyed it if those factors would have been removed. I suppose we’ll never know. But, as of right now, The Handmaid’s Tale just was not my cup of tea.