The Handmaid's Tale

This is the first Margaret Atwood I've read. I have nothing against Canadians: One of my favorite writers is the late great Mordecai Richler. Picking this one up by accident (it was in a stack from a friend to be given away or sold), I plunged into it quite easily. As dystopian novels go, it has all the creepiness and plausibility required. It is skillfully constucted in overlapping flashbacks that slowly reveal the whole horrifying picture. Yet somewhere about page 200, the droning tone and heavy moral sledding brought me to, "All right, enough -- I get it." Seems like it would have made a perfect 30-page story.