I'm blown away, just blown away.
The sheer storytelling powers used to create an atmosphere so bleakly dreamlike and yet so REAL had me constantly pausing and going back to read certain passages again and again. Every detail is perfectly thought out and yet not exposited right away, rather revealed slowly, as the story progresses. And as everything falls into place, as the characters interact, Atwood's bleak and terrifying world of Gilead sort of...builds up around you. (Yeah, I'm eloquent.)
The story is basically that of a society in which women are divided into categories based on their biblical roles in the house: Wives (status), Marthas (Housework) and Handmaids (sex and childbearing). They are deprived of any power and most rights. But it's not exactly a walk in the park for men, either; they're not allowed to love and marry whoever they like, they are assigned a woman, and that only upon achieving some sort of social status. The book is formatted as a "reconstruction" of the experiences of a woman living in this society, known as "Gilead".
It's so real and so frightening and I'm still shook. Dystopia is usually not one of my favorite genres, for this very reason, but the power of the message expressed in The Handmaid's Tale makes it a must-read imo.