The TV series went some way to answering that in its second season, revealing she had sent the child on an “Underground Femaleroad” to Canada. In The Handmaid’s Tale novel we never found out what happened to June and her then-unborn child. Finally, we meet Daisy, a teenage girl in Canada who is (bigger spoiler) actually Nicole, the second child of June (Offred) from The Handmaid’s Tale. Then we meet Agnes, a young woman with an evil step mother growing up in Gilead. First is an Aunt, one of the engineers of Gilead’s repressive stance on women (mild spoiler: it’s the infamous Aunt Lydia). It is told through the voices of three women, who at first seem new to the world but quickly reveal themselves to have significant connections with the previous novel and TV series. The Testaments explains how that process began. In the original book we found out in an academic postscript that Gilead had ultimately fallen. The Testaments answers the long-standing question of what happened to the Republic of Gilead, the oppressive patriarchal-Christian regime introduced in The Handmaid’s Tale that turned women into red-dressed baby factories. The Testaments is now a book that is completely inseparable from the politics surrounding it, including Margaret Atwood’s controversial shared Booker win with Bernadine Evaristo, but I’m going to try and say something about the book itself before I get to that. This review contains spoilers for The Testaments and The Handmaid’s Tale TV series.
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