Cover of The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale

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The Handmaid's Tale

By: Margaret Atwood
Narrated by: Claire Danes
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Audie Award, Fiction, 2013

Margaret Atwood's popular dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale explores a broad range of issues relating to power, gender, and religious politics. Multiple Golden Globe award-winner Claire Danes (Romeo and Juliet, The Hours) gives a stirring performance of this classic in speculative fiction, one of the most powerful and widely read novels of our time.

After a staged terrorist attack kills the President and most of Congress, the government is deposed and taken over by the oppressive and all-controlling Republic of Gilead. Offred, now a Handmaid serving in the household of the enigmatic Commander and his bitter wife, can remember a time when she lived with her husband and daughter and had a job, before she lost even her own name. Despite the danger, Offred learns to navigate the intimate secrets of those who control her every move, risking her life in breaking the rules in hopes of ending this oppression.

Cover Art by Fred Marcellino. Used with permission of Pippin Properties, Inc.

©1985 Margaret Atwood (P)2012 Audible, Inc. Dystopian Genre Fiction Science Fiction Women's Fiction
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Reviews

“Claire Danes sparkles in this performance…Danes’s Offred is complex, and her flashes of intense strength highlight her vulnerability. This is a consuming listen, thanks to Danes’s emotional subtleties.” (AudioFile)
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I loved it all: the story, the style with the critical inner voice of the narrator, the way we discover this new world piece by piece.
Claire Danes is an excellent reader, really.

Brilliant !

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I was quite impatient to hear this story I've heard much good about. The story unfolds irregularily, but is understandable. The idea of the story is interesting but then ... it just goes on and on and on! Maybe that is consistent with the waiting in the story, but I found it repetitive and boring. The insights and thoughts of the narrator often felt shallow to me, and the very "young-American" accent of the reader goes with that. So I would have given just 1 star were it not for the quite surprising ending which I found really good!

Lenghy

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It’s hard to write a deep novel when the first person narrator is a superficial character. This novel doesn’t live up to this ambition, it’s just a potpourri of simplistic mantras from the feminist catechism.
The dystopian world it’s trying to depict lacks substance. Characters have the complexity of superhero villains, human existence is reduced to sitcom-grade issues.
Very disappointing.

Pretentious, Hollywood grade, popcorn drama

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