There’s been a whole bunch of reviews posted for this book already, so I’m not going to spend a lot of time recapping the plot in my own words. Goodreads can help me out here: Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to the food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her […]
Good. But ugh.
Don’t get me wrong, I like me a dystopian mind blow every now and again to make me feel good about my current situation, but guh-damn. I’ve got to read about a lot of unicorns and rainbows to cleanse my palette after this cluster of darkness. The Handmaid’s Tale is an American version of oppressive societies like North Korea, Saudi Arabia, or anywhere ISIS is in charge. With fundamentalist religious imagery, creepy sex scenes, and people displayed on hooks, I noped my way through this […]
Toxic masculinity and misogyny given free reign
Todd Hewitt lives in a community peopled only by men, and has one month left until he too becomes one. All the men are afflicted with something called “the Noise”, meaning they can hear each other’s thoughts, all the time, all over town. There were women in the community once, but they didn’t survive the infection that brought the noise. Todd’s mother was one of the last women to die, while Todd was still a baby. While Todd and his dog, Manchee, are out walking […]
Fascinating YA sci-fi dystopia, needs a little work on the characters.
Various internet peoples have been telling me to read Neal Shusterman for years now, and with Scythe he finally published a book whose premise I couldn’t resist, so here we are. If the rest of his books are as well thought out as this one was, they’re definitely getting moved up my TBR. Scythe takes place several hundred years in the future, after humanity has conquered mortality and disease*, and humans are functionally immortal. But having humanity immortal but still procreating creates an obvious problem. […]