Goodreads’s Best Books of 2023 Released, Great Gifts for Readers This Holiday Season

As the holiday season quickly approaches, consumers are still scrambling to find gifts for their loved ones. And for those of you with avid readers in your lives, that means books. But scouring your nearest Barnes & Noble or your local bookstore can be a challenge when you aren’t sure if the book you choose will suit a person. You may know which genres they prefer or subjects they are interested in, but that doesn’t mean every book will be one they devour and add to their list of favorites. Worst case scenario, it ends up collecting dust on the shelf and only halfway finished.

Luckily for you frantic shoppers, Goodreads has just released the results of their 2023 Choice Awards for the Best Books of 2023 list! Gathering votes from nearly six million of their site-users, Goodreads has collected a list of both fiction and nonfiction titles that their users have deemed the best of 2023. From science fiction to romance and memoirs to history, Goodreads has something for anyone to enjoy on their list. You can even check out the nominees that didn’t win in each category if you want even more gift ideas for readers. 

Scrolling through Goodreads’s social media accounts may highlight the discourse between readers as they argue which book may have been more deserving to win a particular category than others. This is normal considering the subjectivity of art and the wide-range of taste and preferences amongst readers, so don’t fret over buying a book someone else may call ‘boring’ or ‘trash’ (especially if they mention that they didn’t even read it). What someone else hates, your reader may enjoy! If you choose to scroll through their Instagram or Tiktok, you may want to take note of these comments. Not only could you potentially get a better idea of what certain books are about, but you may just get great recommendations! 

Some titles that may be popular gifts this holiday season seemed almost destined to win first-place in their respective categories. Yellowface and Fourth Wing, for example, were immensely popular on bookstagram and booktok this year, so it seems no surprise that they won by such large margins. There were a few interesting outcomes, however. Interestingly, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, which was named the 2023 Barnes & Noble Book of the Year, came in fourth-place in its category for historical fiction, losing to the first-place winner Weyward with almost 30,000 votes. Barnes & Noble determines the winner of their prestigious title by inquiring their booksellers to nominate the titles they feel are particularly remarkable and would recommend to a consumer. This explanation, provided in one of their blog posts this past November,, is rather vague. Meanwhile, Goodreads allows their list to be determined as a sort of popularity contest. A voter isn’t required to have read every book in each category in order to cast their vote, so they merely choose the books they have read and enjoyed to determine who they vote for. This is not necessarily bad, per se, as Goodreads pools together a large group of readers, allowing many different perspectives, interests, and preferences to come together and let their voices be heard. If some books win by large margins, perhaps it’s because a majority of readers believed it deserved to win. 

Lists such as Goodreads’s Best Books of 2023 gives us a great insight into the minds of readers and which books or authors have really made an impact in the publishing world. However, just because one book wins doesn’t mean its fellow nominees in the category are any less enjoyable. Yellowface may have won with over 200,000 votes (with second-place lagging 140,000 votes behind) in the fiction category, but the titles it competed against, such as Hello Beautiful (second-place), Maame (eighth-place), or Evil Eye (thirteenth-place) are also incredible books that you should absolutely check out. If the reader you’re shopping for hasn’t read the book that won in their preferred genre, then you should definitely check it out to see if it’s something they would be interested in. That being said, check out all the nominated books in that category! Even if a book didn’t win, it could be a gem that your reader loves!

The Horrors of the Supernatural & Family Trauma

As Halloween quickly approaches, this is the best season to indulge in a great horror novel that sends chills down your spine. In order to celebrate the spookiest season of the year, this blog post is dedicated to reviewing a popular horror novel published earlier this year. How to Sell A Haunted House by Grady Hendrix is not this author’s first foray into horror and he does not hesitate to thrust you into an environment bursting with tension and eeriness once the main character, Louise, enters the aforementioned haunted house. This narrative  doesn’t just frighten its reader with the hauntings of the supernatural, though. In it, Hendrix explores the depth of unresolved trauma and the ways it can haunt a family through generations.

The story begins with Louise receiving a call from her estranged brother, Mark, with the news that both of their parents tragically died in a car accident. Now, single-parent Louise must leave her daughter Poppy behind in San Francisco to travel back to Charleston for the funeral. As is often the case with a death in the family, money becomes a huge issue between Louise and Mark as they fight over their inheritance and what they should do with the house—including their late-mother’s extensive and creepy puppet collection. Eventually agreeing to sell the house, as the siblings bicker over their past and the differences in how they view their lives, Hendrix makes it clear that something is very wrong with the house. From dolls that seem to move on their own to the attic being nailed shut as though to keep something from getting out, coupled with Aunt Honey’s recollection of their mother saying their father had been “attacked” the night they died, Hendrix eloquently weaves together a story laced with figurative and literal hauntings that forces the siblings to actually talk through their differences and their family’s past.

Hendrix’s haunted house and haunted dolls are undeniably campy but they work well with the dark topics discussed within the family and the awkward, heavy tension that often permeates any interaction between Louise and Mark. Hendrix didn’t attempt to reinvent the horror genre or bring anything new to the table, but the novel is enjoyable because he plays into the camp and the supernatural aspects of the story works to develop the family conflict and force the family to confront the issues they were often prone to avoiding. Avoidance is perhaps the most prominent theme within the story and the setting of the family home is the most appropriate setting to force this confrontation. Although Louise wishes to escape the odd occurrences once more and flee to San Francisco, her determination to ensure the house is ready for sale in order to use the money to provide for her daughter is what drives her to confront the ghosts of her family’s past.

The leader of these haunted dolls is Pupkin, the late-mother’s favorite puppet and a source of great fear for the siblings. As a reader, one can feel how much fun Hendrix likely had while writing this character. His eerie song that echoes in Louise’s head and the aggressive actions he often displays coupled with the joy others’ fear provides him makes him a being of pure chaos. One gets the sense he is, in an ironic play by Hendrix, the puppetmaster jerking Louise and Mark around like his own pair of puppets for his twisted amusement. As Hendrix explains in the novel, “A puppet is a possession that possesses the possessor.” What Pupkin is and what he wants remains a mystery throughout most of the novel, as he represents the physical symbol for all of the secrets that have been buried and carefully avoided within the family. 

Hendrix uses a simplistic foundation for any horror story—a haunted house and haunted dolls—and uses them to reinforce the very real horrors of a family rife with secrecy, family drama, and generational trauma. The story works best when the family begins opening up to one another and the truth finally begins to unravel, allowing Louise to come to terms with her past and make amends with her family, both the living and dead. This is definitely a great novel to check out if you’re looking for some good old-fashioned horror mixed with the exploration of a family and their strained bonds.

Exploring Feminine Rage in “When Women Were Dragons”

Image of the cover of When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill.

In honor of Women’s History Month, this blog post is dedicated to one of the most inspiring books about women that captures the concept of feminine rage. When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill is more than just a story of women spontaneously turning into dragons and taking off toward the sky; it is a raw and emotional tale of womanhood and trying to fit into a society that was never built for that.

This story takes place in America in the 1950s, in a world much like our own. The only difference is that every once in a while, for no foreseeable reason, women spontaneously turn into dragons and take off to the skies, never to be seen again. This all started with what is referred to as “the mass dragoning of 1955” where hundreds of thousands of American wives and mothers suddenly morphed into dragons, causing mass chaos and destruction, and then flew off. This eventually became “taboo” with all other women’s issues and was rarely talked about and never taught formally as a legitimate part of history. The story follows Alex Green, a young girl whose aunt was transformed in the “mass dragoning.” Alex finds herself faced with questions no one will answer. Where is her beloved Aunt? Why is her family forcing her to pretend she never existed? Why are they now referring to her cousin as Alex’s sister? Eventually forced into silence, Alex tries to go on with her life, that is, until her cousin turned sister Bea becomes obsessed with dragons and all the forbidden history behind them.

There are many novels that capture the experience of womanhood and trying to meld into a society that never fully accepts you, but there are none that capture feminine rage the way this novel does. This story uses “dragoning” as something that is so clearly visible and extreme that you think it simply cannot be ignored. It can’t possibly be pushed aside or written out of history, but then it is. This is an extreme version of what society has been doing to women and other marginalized genders for all of time. It’s also a representation of what that dismissal and repression does to women, creating a monster of feminine rage. This book labels “dragoning” or female rage, as just another women’s issue that isn’t important enough to talk about. Women can deal with it internally, or they can allow it to consume them. While society would like you to think that allowing your inner rage to surface is a bad thing, living life as a dragon may prove to be a better option for some than living life as a housewife. Bigger than choosing which path to follow is this: all women are dragons. The issue is that dragons are misconstrued, and seen as mindless violence and chaos. This is because there hasn’t been a place in society for “dragons” because it wasn’t built for them.

In this story, society believed that if they were to ignore dragons, they would go away. But this proved to be impossible because dragons were everywhere. “There were dragons who showed up in Ladies’ sewing circles. And dragons who showed up to labor meetings. And dragons who marched with farmworkers. And dragons who joined anti-war committees. No one knew what to do with them at first. Newspapers didn’t report it. The evening news remained silent. People averted their eyes and changed the subject. Cheeks flushed; voices faltered. Most people simply assumed that if they just ignored dragons that they would go away. The dragons did not go away.”

This book is a must-read for woman identifying people and beyond. This book highlights the importance of the bond of womanhood and embracing femininity for all that it is, which includes strength and rage. This book also touches on LGBTQIA+ themes, mostly in the support of sapphic romance and transgender women as important pillars of femininity. This book talks about how femininity and strength once went hand in hand, and how somewhere along the line, divine femininity and the worship it induced were not only forgotten, but discouraged. Most importantly, the book identifies the pain that women have inside of them that cannot go away or be ignored, and how society can be and must be shaped around women being their full selves, claws and all. 

By Ally Orsini, CambridgeEditors Team

Books to Read Before They Hit the Screen

Daisy Jones & the Six television series promotional image.

Daisy Jones and The Six: Limited series coming to Amazon Prime on March 3, 2023.

            Taylor Jenkins Reid’s best-selling novel is a series of interviews telling the story of a fictional band called Daisy Jones and The Six, their rise to fame, and the highs and lows and rock and roll. This book has all the drama you would expect from a rock band in the seventies, including an off-beat female lead, band romances, backstabbing, and a possible love triangle. The series is set to start releasing episodes in March, with its first episode airing March 3rd.  If you find yourself feeling as though the storyline feels eerily similar, Reid has admitted she got the inspiration for her story from one of the most infamous bands of all time, Fleetwood Mac. Along with an entertaining story, the show will also feature original music as seen in the book, which fans are more than a little excited for. The show is set to star Riley Keough as Daisy Jones and Sam Clafflin as Billy Dune, the main male protagonist.

It Ends with Us: Movie to be released in late 2024.

            It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover is the book that broke the internet, becoming a Tik-Tok sensation. This book was originally published in 2014, and its original popularity was underwhelming. Back when the COVID-19 pandemic first started in 2020, the book was talked about nonstop online until everyone had heard of it. To say this completely changed Colleen Hoover’s career would be an understatement. This book and its revival in popularity nearly single-handedly created #BookTok, a section of Tik-Tok dedicated to talking about books and book recommendations. While there is no official release date for the movie, the two lead actors have been announced, which again sent Tik-Tok into a frenzy. The story follows Lily Bloom, who moves to Boston to follow her dream of opening her own flower shop when she meets Ryle, a dreamy surgeon. When their relationship progresses, her dream man turns into more of a nightmare. Before you read this book or watch the movie, read about trigger warnings, especially if you are specifically affected by domestic abuse.

            What has fans going so crazy over this cast? It was not at all who they expected. Fancasts have been going around since the news dropped of the upcoming movie. The most popular fancast for the leads of Lily and Ryle were Abigail Cowen and Theo James. However, the official leads of the movie are Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, who also originally bought the rights to make the film.

Lessons In Chemistry: Apple TV drama show set to release in 2023.

            Lessons In Chemistry byBonnie Garmus tells the story of Elizabeth Zott, a brilliant chemist who is forced out of the lab and into the kitchen in the sixties. Struggling to make it in the misogynistic world of science at the time, she is discovered for her knowledge of food science and nutrition and is offered a television show. With a daughter to support, she has little choice but to accept the offer. While it isn’t her dream and is far beneath her intellectual abilities and her degree, it pays the bills and is a less rigid path than that of a female scientist. This book was the Barnes & Noble Book of the Year for 2022, a New York Times bestseller, and the Goodreads Choice Award winner for 2022. It was published on March 29, 2022 by Doubleday books. The series stars Brie Larson as Elizabeth Zott, who is most well known for her role as the titular character in Captain Marvel.

By Ally Orsini, CambridgeEditors Team

“Anxious People”: A Book for Everyone

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman cover image.

“. . . sometimes it’s easier to live with your own anxieties if you know that no one else is happy, either.”

Anxious People was one of the first books I read this year, and I can already tell it is going to be one of my favorites. Written by New York Times bestselling author Fredrik Backman, Anxious People was published April 25, 2019, and was adapted into a Netflix limited series in 2021. The story follows a group of people who have nothing in common but that they have all found themselves in the same place at the wrong time. Before you decide to read this book, I would suggest checking out the book’s trigger warnings, as there are some themes that may be sensitive to some readers.

The story begins with a bank robber, who isn’t really a bank robber, who tries to rob a bank. “Tries” being the key phrase here. When the bank robber flees the scene, they accidentally take a group of people hostage who were at an open house looking at an apartment. These eight strangers turn out to be the worst hostages ever, just as the bank robber is the worst bank robber ever. Each person has their own backstory, their own pains, and passions. These eight strangers with nothing in common are all connected to each other in one way or another, though none of them are aware of it. Throughout the hostage situation, it becomes clear to the strangers that their captor may need more saving than they ever did. Reluctant allies, the group bonds together, and learn more about each other than they ever knew about themselves before that fateful day. The story also follows two police officers and a physiatrist, who are connected to this story in ways that will shock you.

This book has quickly become one of my personal favorites and what I would declare a must read. It will make you laugh as much as it will make you cry. It’s truly one of the moments where you will wonder if the author crawled inside your head. The themes are so universally human, yet they feel extremely personal. You will feel both individually represented and simultaneously connected to other human beings around you. This is a book about a group of strangers, a bank robber, and a hostage situation, but it is so much more than that. There is a quote from the book that I believe captures the heart of the story: “Deep down, in memories that we might prefer to suppress even from ourselves, a lot of us know that the difference between us and that man on the bridge is smaller than we might think.” 

There are many circumstances that can lead us down so many different paths. What if you were born into a different family? What if you studied something different in college? What if you never met your current partner? This book captures the fact that we are all just a few wrong steps away from misfortunes. That there is sometimes a gray area between what is good and what is bad. That we could easily have been that homeless person on the street or that man standing on the bridge, and we should have empathy for those people as if they were us. Because, at the end of the day, we are all the same. We are all human.

Funny, relatable, tragic, and totally unique, Anxious People is a modern classic that captures the human experience and explores what it means to be a good person, and what even a good person will do when they’ve run out of options. It questions how we as human beings fit into a system that we have created, and the areas in which that system fails us. At the root of it, this book is about accepting one another, and understanding that we all, hostages and captors, bank tellers and bank robbers, heroes, and criminals, are human.

By Ally Orsini, CambridgeEditors Team

Prince Harry’s Record-Breaking “Spare”

The cover of Prince Harry’s memoir Spare.

Spare, Prince Harry’s memoir, was released on January 10, 2023. The long-anticipated novel was ghost-written by J. R. Moehringer and published by Penguin Random House. This book has created history, breaking the Guinness Book of World Records record for fastest-selling non-fiction book. Spare, in its first week after publication, sold 3.2 million copies worldwide. Out of the 3.2 million copies sold, 1.6 million sales came from American buyers. Spare now replaces the previous record holder, A Promised Land, President Barack Obama’s memoir, which sold 1.7 million copies in its first week after publication.  

The memoir follows Prince Harry’s life, starting with his childhood before his mother, Princess Diana, tragically died. He talks about how the grief changed him; how he blamed the press for the death of his mother and then understandably grew a distaste for the spotlight. The book then takes us through his joining the British Army, along with the repercussions of this, including post-traumatic stress and panic attacks, and ultimately, his struggle to find true love. This all changed when he met Meghan Markle. The public quickly fell in love with the pair. Meghan was a princess of the people that rivaled his own mother’s legacy. The fairytale wedding and whirlwind romance were quickly overshadowed by a whole new array of obstacles brought onto the couple by the press, including racism, lies, and abuse that led to Harry’s decision to leave the royal family.

To say this book has been long anticipated is an understatement. Globally, there has been an obsession with this family—particularly their secrets since the death of Princess Diana. That it’s nearly unheard of for someone to remove themselves from the royal family is reason enough for Prince Harry’s decision to spark attention, but the fact that in doing so, he is following in his mother’s footsteps, is enough to cause record-breaking intrigue worldwide. With the recent passing of Queen Elizabeth Ⅱ, it’s no wonder this book is already record-breaking.

One might question Prince Harry’s reasoning for releasing such a book and the timing of it. Was it purposely released after the queen had passed? According to journalist Rebecca Mead’s New Yorker article “The Haunting of Prince Harry,” Harry stated that this book was “—an invitation to reconciliation, addressed to his father and brother—a way of speaking to them publicly when all his efforts to address them privately have failed to persuade. Spare is, you might say, Prince Harry’s ‘Mousetrap’—a literary device intended to catch the conscience of the King, and the King after him.”

This book, and it’s wild success, are just proof that at its core, family dynamics are universally complicated. There is a reason that so many different people feel the need to read this book. While a common interest in the royal family and drama in general is definitely a factor, it’s also because every family has its own form of dysfunction. Even though there are very few people who can relate to the royal family in any other way, almost everyone can relate to their family dynamics on some level. While the book is receiving mixed reviews so far, the successful launch can be explained by human nature, both in uncovering the secrets of a notoriously mysterious family, as well as connecting to the universal experience of family drama. 

-Ally Orsini, CambridgeEditors Team

Revisiting Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights

All writers are given the same piece of advice to write each and every day; Ross Gay took on this challange and made it literal. 

And so The Book of Delights was born, Ross Gay’s collection of personal essays, a one-year project beginning and ending on Gay’s birthday. Each piece is framed around the blissful premise of capturing the little pleasures in everyday life. 

The topics of the delights range from the smallest joy, like a “Flower in the Curb,” where Gay recounts seeing, “some kind of gorgous flower, mostly a red I don’t think I actually have words for, a red I maybe only seen in this flower growing out of the crack between the curb and the asphalt…”  (Gay 9). 

In addition to the light moments, Gay reveals truths that ask his reader to think. A writer of color, Gay raises the issue of inequality throughout the text, like when he discusses his friend’s book : 

“…the fact that innocence is an impossible state for black people in America who are, by virtue of this country’s fundamental beliefs, always presumed guilty. It’s not hard to get this. Read Michelle Alexander’s New Jim Crow. Or Devah Pager’s work about hiring practices showing that black men without a record receive job callbacks at a rate lower than white men previously convicted of felonies… (Gay 25).”

This perspective that Gay shares invite his readers not only to be appreciative, but critical, of their surrounding world. More serious themes such as this are interwoven throughout the novel, balancing the existing uplifting moments. 

As a reader, this feels more authentic to read than a book solely about delights. It’s not realistic to have a positive outlook every day for an entire year. Gay’s balance of the ideas he wrestles with in daily life, along with the little joys he experiences make for a reliable narrator. 

The Book of Delights is a great read that asks its reader to reflect on life’s positive experiences, amid times of uncertainty and negativity. Its essay-like structure of one delight at a time makes it easy to breeze through, since it is connected by a premise more than a plot. It’s positive tone will put you in an uplifting mood and help you to notice the daily delights in life than go often overlooked. 

– Charleigh

The Coronavirus Novel

The Simpsons “predicted” the 2016 election results and medium Laurie Garrett foresaw the 90’s AIDS epidemic. Whether this is truth or coincidence, Ling Ma’s telling of a devastating pandemic in her novel Severance is uncanny. 

Written in 2012, the apocalyptic-fiction novel has resurfaced since the pandemic began. Severance tells the story of a New York Bible publisher, Candace Chen, who wakes up and the world as she knows it has shut down. 

This turn of events happens after Shen Fever, an airborne fungal infection, emerges from a production facility in Shenzhen, China. No one knows how the infection reached the United States, but it is not long until it reaches the rest of the world. Citizens become “fevered,” experiencing cold and flu-like symptoms, tiredness, dizziness, vomiting, and ultimately a loss of consciousness. 

Reading Severance in the pandemic, with cases increasing yet again, is a surreal experience. There is desperate talk of a vaccine. Infection rates climb, as does the death toll. Everyone is fleeing New York. The United States implements a travel ban. Working in-person shifts to working from home. For jobs deemed “essential,” each employer is mandated to provide its workers with sanitation supplies. Ma even depicts mask wearing, such as the safety and discomforts a hot, N-95 mask can bring. In one exchange, a character nastily asks Candace “Where’s your mask?” when she forgets hers.

Even the naturalism seen in the pandemic appears in the novel. While we saw deer and wild boar freely roam cities, and South African lions napping in the street, Candace too experiences a similar return to nature. She finds and photographs a horse in Times Square running, “purposefully, cheerfully, unhurried, down Broadway.” It is as if a horse had perfect business being in midtown, making the sight all the more strange. 

The monotony of living through a shutdown also comes through in the novel, as characters pass the time trying on clothes and rearranging furniture. Most of the characters look to the media for guidance and answers, as The New York Times keeps a tally of those who become fevered. Candace starts a blog aimed to capture the post-apocalyptic feel of New York City — empty streets, still subway tunnels, and abandoned food carts are all shared online with her followers. 

After closing Severance, I wondered, how could someone capture this situation years before it happened? Was this coincidence no different than a TV sitcom, predicting a presidential candidate? Or is Ling Ma a prophet? 

I settled on an imaginative and thoughtful composer.

-Charleigh

Meat Symbolism in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian

If you’re looking for a terrific and horrific read this Halloween season, look no further than Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. (Please Note: The Vegetarian is a psychological horror/thriller novel and may not be suited for all readers. The book depicts violence/sexual violence, mental illness, and abuse, so please be advised before reading). 

The Vegetarian is written in three parts with three narrators. Part one follows protagonist Yeong-he and is narrated by her husband, Mr. Cheong. As a psychological thriller, this novel focuses on the psychological trauma Yeong-he experiences, and the mental anguish of those around her.

Mr. Cheong isn’t the best husband: he opens the novel by saying his wife is average. His narrative tone is that of a superior partner in a relationship, and the way in which he speaks to his wife indicates mistreatment. 

We learn Yeong-he is undergoing a significant change. After waking up from a nightmare, she vows to never eat meat again. Meanwhile, Yeong-he’s personality is becoming muted. She turns socially withdrawn and quiet, as if she is experiencing depressive symptoms. 

Yeong-he’s repulsion toward meat could speak to a greater symbolic meaning: the repulsion toward her own husband. Psychoanalytic theorist and philosopher Julia Kristeva writes about this very topic of abjection, or the feeling of horror that causes the subconscious and unconscious mind to confuse the self with the other. Regarding food as an example, Kristeva writes: 

“‘I’ want none of that element, sign of their desire; ‘I’ do not want to listen, ‘I’ do not assimilate it, ‘I’ expel it. But since the food is not an ‘other’ for ‘me,’ who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which ‘I’ claim to establish myself.” 

When considering the text from a feminist lens, the symbolic implications of meat are hard to ignore.  From a physical standpoint, meat is flesh and body, and often contains blood. It’s a common trope in art for meat to represent masculinity.

Yeong-he’s disgust towards meat could be because she unconsciously likened it to something primal. Meat could be the threat she is misinterpreting to harm her own reality. Not eating meat goes against her husband’s wishes, and is an exercise in control. 

This reading would suggest Mr. Cheong and masculinity itself is Yeong-he’s real problem, not her unwillingness to eat meat. Ironically, Mr. Cheong becomes more domineering to try to combat this eating issue, and Yeong-he’s mental state only worsens. 

If you’re curious like to learn what happens to Yeong-he and want to curl up with a page-turning thriller,  I recommend The Vegetarian.

-Charleigh 

Reading Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments in Late 2020

Like many others in my age demographic, I was first introduced to Margaret Atwood through the television series adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale. After watching a thrilling season finale during 2018, I went to a local bookstore and bought the book for myself.

I was in Oxford at the time, so I paid for my copy in pounds instead of dollars. Either my accent, my pace counting coins, or a combination of the two made me instantly recognizable as American. In Atwood’s signature work, the United States is no more.

The storekeeper who handed back my change told me, “I used to think highly of your country. Now I pray for it.”

The Handmaid’s Tale paints a grim picture of a worst-case scenario, but the patriarchal society in the book did not emerge fully-formed or without warning. Gilead was built one brick at a time, just like any other country. Atwood’s work encourages readers to avoid making a critical misconception: “Something that bad could never happen here.”

Atwood only included events and crimes against humanity in her imagined dystopia that have occurred in our reality. Although The Testaments came out in 2019, Atwood’s sequel is eerily similar to the state of the U.S. in late 2020.

Separation of church and state is threatened, far-right groups are emboldened, and democracy itself is endangered. Comparisons are made even more unsettling by newly sworn-in Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett having ties to People of Praise, where she served as a “handmaid.” In 1986, Atwood stated she pulled inspiration from a “Catholic charismatic spinoff sect,” that labeled women “handmaids.” Although Atwood has yet to confirm or deny People of Praise influencing Gilead’s radicalized society, the connection still — and should — raise concern.

The Testaments speak to the slow and steady process of becoming morally compromised. The sequel begins 16 years after The Handmaid’s Tale concludes and is told by three narrators, one being the notorious Aunt Lydia. Lydia describes the order of Aunts, where women vie for power through oppressing other women and continually choosing the lesser evil. Aunt Lydia is a compelling force in the sequel, just as complex as she is detestable.

But there are two other narrators in The Testaments: Agnes and Daisy, two young, brave women. Atwood’s later witnesses are constrained by circumstances and aren’t unstoppable heroines. Their goal is more small-scale than leading a revolution, as is the objective of protagonists in other dystopian books. Simply put, Agnes and Daisy want to survive.

The Handmaid’s Tale came out in 1985, and its sequel shows small marks of its creation during the 21st century. News is referred to as “fake,” and insults like “slut” make their appearance known. Such subtle nuances embedded in Atwood’s work remind the reader that although Gilead is fictional, the comparisons between the country and the United States ring as startlingly familiar.

The Testaments does not place the reader in a comfortable position. Instead, the book challenges its audience. Aunt Lydia says, “How can I have behaved so badly, so cruelly, so stupidly? you will ask. You yourself would never have done such things! But you yourself never have had to.”

In this sequel, Atwood takes back the world she created and demands introspection and critical thinking, whereas the television show risks leaning into entertainment value and escapism.

Atwood’s The Testaments calls readers to bear witness to events, to speak out against oppressors, and not take anything at face value. The timing of such a work being readily available in paperback form could not have been better.

Read Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments here.
-Cassidy