Kaley Jean’s Reviews > The Handmaid's Tale > Status Update

The quote that I’m thinking of while I read these past two chapters: be careful what you eat when you’re hungry.

“And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you…and you would be filled with a sense of wonder because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.”

Idk who to believe.

It always infuriates me when people use the Bible out of context, and it’s part of the dystopian world for this book.

I think this may be my first time reading a dystopian novel that isn’t YA. (Besides The Giver, which I’m uncertain is classified as “YA”.)

Aunt Lydia can take her advice and run into a pole. Okay thank you.

“We were the people who were not in the papers. We moved in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.”

As Offred scans the room, I can’t help but think of The Yellow Wallpaper. The scene reminds me of what may happen to ladies if they’re not allowed to do anything - not read, not write, stick in a room with no freedom…

I’m trying to figure out our MC… but I think I like her so far. She still has her thoughts, which seems to be a difficult thing to keep in this dystopian world.

“I wanted, then, to turn her into an older sister, a motherly figure, someone who would understand and protect me.” Probably one of the saddest realizations in this dystopian world.