I live in the Adirondacks where we have plenty of black bears. I cannot picture a scenario where these smelly musty creatures are at all desirable. And I don’t want to picture it.

We see everything through the eyes of the mother, and she is an unreliable narrator. She admits she never wanted Kevin. She broke his arm, and who has a seven year old still in diapers without taking them to all kinds of doctors to find out why? She assumes he’s just being a pain in the ass. And she was insufferably elitist and superior. So I do wonder how much was Kevin and how much was mother. Which is exactly what we’re supposed to wonder.

It is a masterpiece. Offred is a prisoner, how do you expect her to “explore the world around her”? We see what she sees. Of course the end is abrupt, she is suddenly taken away. Was she rescued by Mayday? Sent to the colonies? The wall? We don’t know. It’s terrifying. The “bits of backstory” explain how America failed and Giliad rose. Kinda important. And by the way, the treatment of women in The Handmaids Tale is true. Everything Atwood describes has happened to women in some culture at some point. This is a piece of very important literature, a book to which attention must be paid.