Whew. I read this in a day, which I haven't done in awhile. It's very propulsive, at first, because the setup is great and the tightness in your chest is compelling, and later, because (unfortunately) the book turns action-y and you need to see what happens.

The hook is genius-- girls and women are limited to 100 words per day. There's good reason for a patriarchal society to silence women, and the book (set basically right now) does a good job showing why. The other issues broke my heart-- what if girls never really get to speak? How do humans acquire language? Some good juicy science-y stuff. What about love? Pillow talk, baring one's soul to a new love-- how does that work when you can't talk? Even Offred gets to talk with her friends at the grocery store (digression: that actually makes the TV series more powerful for me; when the Handmaids open their mouths and normal modern speech comes out, belying the weird sci-fi world they live in.)

The last third breaks down some; too many implausible turns (the timeline itself doesn't make any sense), too much thriller stuff. I've seen some reviews hate on the book for needing a man to save the day-- well, the men have the power. The bigger theme is the "when good men stand by" one. And the hate for the anti-Christian perspective: well, um. Who the fuck do you think we have to thank for the state we're actually in in real life? Jesus H Christ, and I don't mean you, real Jesus, because you would not have stood for this shit.