Hundreds of professional women - doctors, lawyers, business owners, professors - are herded at gunpoint into the Harvard football stadium, many killed by firing squad, others recruited to shoot. In the new novel, we learn that Lydia’s life as a family court judge ended in a single day. Offred’s lyrical, precise voice gave readers the shocking limits of her existence, in a small bedroom, on sidewalks where she saw humans hanged from the Wall, bloody mouths pressing through white hoods, and inside those walls, the Eyes and the Aunts, like Lydia, ruled over the republic. Offred, narrator of the first novel, attempted escape into the woods toward Canada, her husband presumed shot dead by Guardians, her young daughter torn from her arms. Illicit sex, of course, in this republic founded on sexual control, leads to the complicated, fascinating plot of “The Testaments,” just as illegal sex and forbidden Scrabble led to the downfall of another Commander in “The Handmaid’s Tale.” The most-prized humans are children, and yet what happens to daughters is no gift. The Commanders, with their blue-robed Wives, red-robed Handmaids, and green-robed Martha housekeepers, retain power in Cambridge, Mass., heart of Gilead. Their testaments begin 15 years after the beginning of civil war. Daisy, a teenager raised in Canada whose parents are killed by Gilead terrorists, comes to learn her own connections to the poisonous regime in the United States. Agnes, at 14, is betrothed to an even more powerful Commander. Atwood’s new novel is all about narrative, the written and recorded testimonies of three women: Aunt Lydia, a terrifying and punitive woman, writes her foundation story now, with hoarded ink, pages hidden in a Catholic historical tome.
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