In secret, Aunt Lydia despises Gilead and becomes a mole supplying critical information to the Mayday resistance organization.įifteen years after the events of The Handmaid's Tale, a girl named Agnes Jemima is growing up in Boston as the adopted daughter of Commander Kyle and his wife Tabitha. The Aunts use Ardua Hall as their headquarters and enjoy certain privileges that include reading "forbidden" texts, such as Cardinal John Henry Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua. After enduring weeks of squalid conditions, torture, and solitary confinement, she and a small group of other women are handpicked by Commander Judd and Vidala, a pre-existing supporter of Gilead, to become Aunts-an elite group of women tasked with creating and overseeing the laws and uniforms governing Gilead's women. Lydia, a divorced judge, is imprisoned with other women in a stadium during the establishment of Gilead. The novel alternates among the perspectives of three women, presented as portions of a manuscript written by one (the Ardua Hall Holograph) and testimonies by the other two. Actress Ann Dowd will reprise her role as Aunt Lydia. Streaming service Hulu, which also produces the TV series adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale, announced in 2022 that The Testaments will also become a TV series after The Handmaid's Tale 's final season concludes. It was also voted 'Best Fiction' novel in the Goodreads Choice Awards 2019, winning by over 50,000 votes. The Testaments was a joint winner of the 2019 Booker Prize, alongside Bernardine Evaristo's novel Girl, Woman, Other. It is narrated by Aunt Lydia, a character from the previous novel Agnes, a young woman living in Gilead and Daisy, a young woman living in Canada. The novel is set 15 years after the events of The Handmaid's Tale. It is the sequel to The Handmaid's Tale (1985). That’s about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.The Testaments is a 2019 novel by Margaret Atwood. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it’s the hardest to do anything with. Sure, we get born in this world and we eventually die but what happens in between is still up to us and to the choices we will make. In the end, Happy Endings sounds like a tutorial on how to write a story but it is also a rough tutorial on how to live our lives. If you like, it can be “Madge,” “cancer,” “guilty and confused,” and “bird watching.” Then Madge devotes herself to charity work until the end of A. The rest of the story is about how kind and understanding they both are until Fred dies. It was interesting to read through all the possibilities (six in all) contemplated by Atwood and I even had a good laugh at a couple of scenarios. What happens through Points B to Y? Choose your own adventure. Unlike Choose Your Own Adventure, however, where the chapters are really adventures for a grade school kid like me (scary creatures, dark cellars, animal transformations, etc.), in Happy Endings, the characters are adults (John and Mary) and the story begins when John and Mary meet. I think this is what Margaret Atwood wants to point out in this story: that you may choose different paths but will still eventually have the same ending. Often, I would read through all the options and exhaust all possible choices and would find out that certain choices sometimes leads to different scenarios but would still have the same endings. I enjoyed jumping from one page to another, trying to know what happens next if I choose a particular act or the other. Happy Endings reads like those Choose Your Own Adventure books I used to read as a child. It’s a good thing that I was able to sample her writing in this short story before I delve into her full-length works. I have Margaret Atwood’s Blind Assassin and Surfacing on my to-be-read shelf for quite sometime now but haven’t gone ahead to reading them. Story Review: Happy Endings by Margaret Atwood
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