The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood (pub. 1985)
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This came out when I was like 9 years old, and I didn't read it until I was in my 40s. (I started in 2020, and didn't finish until 2022, just because executive dysfunction made it nearly impossible for me to read anything.) The writing contains a lot of wordplay and ways of describing things that never would have occurred to me. And I remember at one point thinking the style reminded me of magical realism. And it's mostly very stream-of-consciousness and skips around in time as the narrator recollects things from her past. But part of that may be because of the in-universe nature of the Tale, which I don't want to spoil, but there's an epilog called "Historical Notes" which is set in 2195 (roughly two centuries after the main setting of the book, I would guess). It gives a potential explanation for the scattered nature of the narration, not that one is really needed.

The Tale's narrator is a woman called "Offred", whose real name is never divulged; she's not allowed to use it anymore. It's set sometime after a revolution in which the United States government was overthrown and replaced by a religious-military dictatorship, and the country was renamed the Republic of Gilead. I guess it took over all other religions, including Christianity. (Laws are based on a radical interpretation of the Old Testament.) Anyone who didn't convert was killed or sent away to the "Colonies", along with various other people who were deemed useless or... whatever. There are lots of reasons people get killed or sent away. And apparently all minorities were put on reservations, or something. (I've forgotten a lot since it took so long for me to read the book. Some things I say about it I may have simply read online, and I probably get some details wrong.) People's rights are severely limited, especially those of women. There are Wives, who have a certain amount of power over their households, though of course they are subservient to their husbands. There are Aunts, whose job it is to indoctrinate women who will become Handmaids. The Handmaids are servants to some degree, but mostly they're used by the Commanders they belong to for reproductive purposes, if their Wives can't produce children. There's a whole sick ceremony that goes along with that, which I don't even want to get into. And there are other kinds of servants, called Marthas. Offred, of course, is a Handmaid. She belongs to a Commander named Fred, whose Wife is called Serena Joy.

Well, throughout the narration we learn things about what Offred's life was like before the revolution. She was married to a man named Luke, and they had a young daughter, who was taken away and given to another family after the revolution. Offred has no idea what became of Luke. We also learn what her life is like in the present. And... I don't know, a lot of stuff happens throughout the book, which I don't want to spoil. Though eventually Offred learned of a resistance called Mayday, but we don't learn too much about that. And the story ends on a cliffhanger. (There's a sequel called "The Testaments", which I may or may not read someday.) So... I don't know what else to say about the plot.

If I'm not saying much about the plot, I should at least talk about the book's themes, but I'm afraid I'm just too mentally drained by my executive dysfunction and related troubles. It's all just very... you know, dystopian. It's one of the great works of dystopian literature, and I'm glad to have finally read it. It can be considered a feminist novel, because of how deeply misogynistic Gileadean society is. But it's also called "white feminism", because it takes real historical experiences of people of color and applies them to white women, while ignoring people of color entirely. The book has been criticized for that, which I agree with. But it's still a powerful and deeply disturbing story, and even reading it in the 21st century, one can see parallels to certain aspects of how our own society treats women, and how many religious fundamentalists attempt to make things worse than they already are. (Not that the novel is an indictment of religion in and of itself, but as a tool that can be used to achieve tyrannical goals.) There, I've said more than I thought I could muster, but it's still not nearly adequate to describe the book.

There was a film based on the book in 1990, which I hope to see someday. I also want to watch a web series on Hulu that's based on the book, which began in 2017 and as of the time I'm writing this is ongoing. But I'm not sure when I might get around to either of those things.