The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood

This novel tells the story of a near-future revolution that replaces the United States with the Republic of Gilead, an oppressive fundamentalist Christian theocracy. We are vividly shown the dark side of religion, what happens when those beliefs are taken to a tyrannical extreme: women are forbidden to own property, vote, read, or write; homosexuality and heretical ideas are punished by death. Basically, what Vice President Mike Pence would call an ideal world.

I found the book difficult to read not because of the disturbing content, but due to the stilted language: "I walk around to the back door, open it, go in, set my basket down on the kitchen table." The choppy writing gave me fits for some reason; I had to re-read sections often because I wasn't parsing the prose properly. Given the environment I was expecting to discover that the author was secretly writing down her thoughts to explain the odd syntax, but in the epilogue we learn the author recorded everything on tapes—meaning the writing should have been more fluid, not less.

I would have liked to see more about the mechanics of the revolution (an ongoing war is mentioned multiple times, and at one point the Republic of Texas is shown to be an independent country again) but given the author is a woman and therefore forbidden from knowledge and news the lack of detail makes sense. Regardless, this is a thought provoking read and should be required reading for anyone interested in a "fair and balanced" world.

First Sentence:

We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.