SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE Margaret Atwood's dystopian masterpiece, The Handmaid's Tale, has become a modern classic—and now she brings the iconic story to a dramatic conclusion in this riveting sequel. More than fifteen years after the ...

Given the original Handmaid's Tale and the grim and disturbing television series, we walked into the Testaments with a lot of expectation. NUBClub ultimately felt that Atwood did a good but not exceptional job with this sequel. The Testaments is a book of three stories -- one from Aunt Lydia's perspective as a member of the power structure, one from a young woman in Gilead, and one from a Canadian woman outside the system. This setup was a good one, and we all felt that the Lydia plot in particular was great. Atwood's worldbuilding and ability to create believable horrors out of misogynist beliefs remain very strong, and her account of how Lydia became who she was is very real and very compelling. Similarly, we all liked the way the myths of Gilead reached the young women of the story, and Atwood does a good job of showing how ignorance manifests in shocking ways in totalitarian systems in small moments. That said, the television show in a lot of ways goes much more overtly dark than the novels, so after seeing the show, the punch of the novels is much weaker, and that makes the Testaments less powerful than it might have been in an earlier generation. More importantly, we were disappointed that Atwood chose to remain deeply connected to the original book in terms of plot. We understand that Lydia is a character we know, and that tying her to a new plot was a way of keeping us emotionally invested in the story, but that choice means that over three properties we only see essentially one thread of what is supposed to be an entire nation. Part of the power of the original book was the idea that June was just one small figure among millions of people suffering in Gilead. The smallness of her story was part of its power. If the sequel continues to revolve around June's small cohort, and that story has any effect on the history of Gilead, then the world itself starts to feel very small, and that hurts the power of the story. For the dystopian world to work, there need to be thousands and thousands of woman in June's position, thousands of Aunts acting complicitly, hundreds of towns with local Commanders and local betrayals. Atwood's choice to tell one story over several books is a convenient one for the plot, but it detracts from the power of the greater world. At the same time, the plot of the Testaments is just too tidy and adventure-focused. The Baby Nicole plot resolves in a very cheesy way, and it concludes in an almost spy-genre story of smuggling and escape that defies all of the existential threat of June's non-heroic story. The Testaments is a good book, and Atwood remains a strong worldbuilder in it, but the full power of the sequel is less than it could have been because Atwood chose to keep her focus so narrow and conveniently tied up.