“You don’t believe that the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you.”

The Testaments is Margaret Atwood’s much-anticipated follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale. And in many ways, it gives the reader what they want. The Handmaids do not play a prominent role in the book, but instead the other women of Gilead: the Aunts, young girls/future Wives, and those that have escaped. Through the three alternating characters, you learn more about what has happened in Gilead 15 years after THT, revealing some of the cracks in the government’s rule. It was interesting to learn more about the training and practice of the Aunts, characters who we see but don’t learn much about in THT. I also enjoyed the different perspectives of the three characters.

That said, I wanted more and I think that’s why this book is a 4 star for me. In particular, I wanted more flashbacks of how Gilead was founded. We get these for a few chapters, and they are admittedly really difficult to read, but also important. Atwood seems to be drawing connections between our own political situation and that of Gilead and I wanted her to do more with that. The chapters taking place in Canada were my least favorite, mostly because I was so confused about what was happening most of the time. I think that was the point, for us to feel the character’s confusion, but it was frustrating as a reader.

Overall though, this is a worthwhile read. It’s a difficult one, with trigger warnings galore, but I don’t think Atwood WANTS us to be comfortable while we read it. The importance of the book is our discomfort with what is happening in a world that is admittedly not too far removed from our own.

TW: Abuse, sexual assault, suicide, violence