The Testaments - Margaret Atwood

I got pretty lucky with this one - I wasn't really planning to rush straight out and buy it the day it was released, but I happened to be doing my weekly supermarket shop and saw it casually sat there on the shelf, for half its RRP. Naturally, I snapped it up. As I said in my review of 'The Handmaid's Tale', I wasn't completely enamoured by it. I had extremely high hopes for Atwood after everything I'd heard, but the original novel did fall slightly short of the mark for me - the concept was amazing, but perhaps the execution was lacking.

That being said, I enjoyed 'The Testaments' more. It's not what I expected, and if you're hoping for a straight-forward follow on from the 1985 novel, you won't get it! The novel doesn't pick up from the first cohesively, but rather explores a set of new narrators and leaves Offred's tale largely unfinished. We are presented with three narrators, all of whom are very different to Offred, who was passive and repressed. The protagonists in 'The Testaments' are all much more active and gutsy when it comes to fighting the patriarchy, which I liked. I often found Offred's narration frustrating, due to her largely accepting her powerlessness. This was refreshing!

I won't spoil the plot, but I wish that Atwood hadn't confined her linking of the two books to the last couple of pages. It was only in these final moments that we really understood how both novels corresponded with one another, and the story of Gilead was really rounded off. I would have liked this to have been fleshed out more, and more of the detail explored around what really happened.

I did think certain aspects of the narrative were slightly obvious, and there were a couple of eye-roll moments, which I’ve gathered is a fairly common opinion judging by some of the other reviews on Goodreads. But on the whole I enjoyed it, more so than the original for sure. The story was nicely rounded off and the ending was final which I liked - I’m not sure a sequel was entirely necessary, but it was certainly well done.