This is another one of those books that I asked for one Christmas because there’s an episode of Gossip Girl named after it, and have never got round to reading.

I’m a firm believer in the practice of reading a book before you watch the TV show/film that’s based on it, and I insisted on reading this before my boyfriend and I watched the Hulu series.

Now for anyone who hasn’t read this or seen the TV series (where have you been), fair warning, this covers some seriously awful ideas, but what makes it scarier still is you can almost believe it’s something that could happen.

Following a war, America becomes a religious state, where all the progress we’ve made over the years is forgotten, and men rule. Women have no rights, but at the same time are held up as precious, due to their ability to continue the race.

Well, some of them have that ability.

See, turns out that the way we’re living our lives now has led to many men and women becoming sterile, which the kooks in this book believe to be a punishment from God.

Women who are fertile become handmaids, and are put in households to have kids for the powerful men and their sterile wives.

Sounds creepy huh, yeah, you don’t know the half of it.

As usual I ended up sitting watching the TV show and thinking ‘that doesn’t happen in the book…. that doesn’t happen in the book…. that doesn’t happen in the book’, but hey, they had to develop it a bit I guess.

This is a must-read for anyone interested in feminism, gender equality and the fight for human rights, I’d definitely recommend.