For someone who loves dystopian stories, it is really amazing that it took the Hulu adaptation of A Handmaid's Tale to finally get me to read this novel. People had been telling me to read it for years, but I just never got around to it. It was even the book selection in my local book club a few months before the premiere of the show, but I was reading something else at the time and it managed to slip through the cracks once more. Which is ironic because to me that was the underlying theme in this book: letting things fall through the cracks because we don't really want to pay attention or don't have time. Until finally, it's too late to do something about it.

This is probably beating a dead horse at this point, but as a woman, it is important for me to pay attention to those who are in power and can create laws capable of stripping me of my rights as a person. I was so proud that so many woman stood up to the current administration at the beginning of this year and boldly stated, "No, this is not acceptable."

Like this novel painfully points out, the rights these women took for granted on a daily basis were not taken away all at once. It was only through implementing new laws over time that women became no more than breeding utensils. So, while this beautifully horrifying story spoke to me, this is the lesson that I took away from it.

Many people, men and women alike, did not understand why we were so upset. "What rights have been taken away from you?" they asked. While certain elected officials were actually fighting healthcare that benefited women among other visible sexist acts that had been demonstrated, it was more than that. Yes, for the most part, women in this country are on equal footing with men, but that did not happen overnight. The moment we stop paying attention and stop vocalizing our concern to those in power, is the moment these same individuals can begin to strip the freedoms that the women before us worked so hard to obtain.

Yes, it gets tedious trying to make sure those in Congress actually hear us, but we can't let the bastards grind us down. We have to keep at it, even when it feels like there is no point or no one is listening. We can enjoy our comforts and at the same time, ensure the women who come after us get to have them, too.

Memorable Quotes/Scenes

• "It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge."

• "She doesn't make speeches anymore. She has become speechless. She stays in her home, but it doesn't seem to agree with her. How furious she must be, now that she's been taken at her word."

• "We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it."

• "But this is wrong, nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from."

• "I am like a room where things once happened and now nothing does, except the pollen of the weeds that grow up outside the window, blowing in as dust across the floor."

• "Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes."

• "Of course, some women believed there would be no future, they thought the world would explode. That was the excuse they used, says Aunt Lydia. They said there was no sense in breeding. Aunt Lydia's nostrils narrow: such wickedness. They were lazy women, she says."

• "Look at him, slicing up the carrots. Don't you know how many women's lives, how many women's bodies, the tanks had to roll over just to get that far?"

• "But who can remember pain, once it's over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind."

• "You can't stick your hand through a glass window without getting cut."

• "Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some."

• "Humanity is so adaptable, my mother would say. Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations."