Thirty-four years after The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood returned to Gilead. The Testaments picks up fifteen years after the original novel’s ambiguous ending, told through three narrators. Aunt Lydia is the terrifying enforcer from the first book, now revealed as a far more complex figure than anyone expected. Agnes is a girl raised in Gilead’s suffocating patriarchy. And Daisy is a teenager in Canada who discovers her connection to the regime across the border. The novel won the Booker Prize in 2019 (shared with Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other) and immediately reignited debate about whether beloved novels should get sequels at all.
The conversation around The Testaments is inseparable from its predecessor and from the television adaptation that ran between the two books. Readers came to the sequel with wildly different expectations, some wanting the claustrophobic horror of the original, others wanting the political thriller energy of the TV series, and Atwood chose a path that satisfied the second group more than the first.
Aunt Lydia’s Transformation and Atwood’s Plot Mastery
The revelation of Aunt Lydia is the novel’s greatest achievement. In The Handmaid’s Tale, she was a one-dimensional enforcer, a true believer wielding an electric cattle prod. Here, Atwood peels back decades of survival, compromise, and secret resistance to reveal a woman who became a monster to avoid being destroyed and then spent years building the architecture of Gilead’s downfall from within. Her sections are written with cold, precise intelligence, and her voice is the most compelling in the book. Readers consistently describe her chapters as the reason to read the novel.
Atwood’s plotting is remarkably tight for a literary novelist. The Testaments moves with genuine urgency, building through double crosses, smuggling operations, and narrowing escapes toward a climax that delivers real tension. After the deliberately unresolved ending of The Handmaid’s Tale, readers who wanted answers, wanted to see Gilead begin to crack, find satisfaction here. Atwood proves she can write a thriller when she chooses to, and the machinery of the plot is expertly constructed.
The worldbuilding expands Gilead in convincing ways. We learn how women within the system carve out pockets of power, how the Aunts became their own political faction, how the regime handles internal corruption, and how resistance networks operate across the Canadian border. Agnes’s chapters, depicting a girl raised entirely within Gilead’s ideology, effectively show how totalitarian systems shape the inner lives of those born into them. Her slow awakening to the reality of her world carries genuine emotional weight.
Atwood’s prose remains precise and controlled, with flashes of the dark wit that has always characterized her best work. Aunt Lydia’s narration in particular contains moments of acid humor that cut through the thriller mechanics. Her assessment of her own compromises, delivered with a self-awareness that is both chilling and sympathetic, represents some of Atwood’s most sophisticated character work.
Living in the Shadow of a Masterpiece
The most common criticism is that The Testaments lacks the unsettling power of The Handmaid’s Tale. The original worked through suffocation, through Offred’s trapped perspective and the reader’s inability to see beyond the walls of her captivity. The Testaments, by contrast, shows Gilead from multiple angles, reveals its inner workings, and ultimately offers the reassurance that the regime will fall. This is satisfying in a thriller sense but less disturbing in a literary one. The ambiguity is gone, and with it some of the dread that made the original so effective.
The two younger narrators are weaker than Aunt Lydia by a significant margin. Agnes and Daisy, despite their different backgrounds, share a similar voice that some readers find interchangeable. Their sections can feel like conventional YA dystopian fiction compared to the complexity of Aunt Lydia’s chapters. The contrast is so stark that readers frequently wish Atwood had written the entire novel from Lydia’s perspective.
The coincidences that drive the plot strain credibility at times. Without revealing specifics, the connections between the three narrators rely on coincidences that feel more like the requirements of a thriller plot than the messy reality Atwood depicted in the first book. The original novel felt like a world. This one sometimes feels like a constructed narrative, and the difference matters.
The television show’s influence is detectable, and not always positively. Certain elements of The Testaments seem to respond to the TV adaptation as much as to the original novel, and readers who never watched the show sometimes feel they’re missing context. Whether Atwood was consciously writing alongside the show or simply inhabiting the same cultural moment, the result is a sequel that occasionally feels calibrated for a multimedia audience rather than purely for readers of the first book.
The Moral Complexity of Complicity
The most important thing The Testaments offers is its exploration of what it means to survive within an oppressive system. Aunt Lydia did terrible things. She rationalized them as necessary. She built power within the regime while secretly working to destroy it. But her resistance doesn’t erase her complicity, and Atwood refuses to let her off the hook. This is the novel’s most sophisticated contribution to the Gilead story: the idea that the people best positioned to bring down a totalitarian system are the ones who are most compromised by it, and that this paradox has no clean resolution.
Should You Read The Testaments?
This is the right book for readers who loved The Handmaid’s Tale and want to know what happens next, particularly those who found the original’s ambiguous ending frustrating rather than powerful. If you enjoy well-plotted literary thrillers and are interested in how totalitarian systems function from the inside, Aunt Lydia’s sections alone justify the read.
Skip it if you treasure the original novel’s ambiguity and don’t want it resolved. If you loved The Handmaid’s Tale specifically for its refusal to offer hope or closure, the sequel’s more conventional satisfactions may feel like a betrayal of what made the first book extraordinary. Also manage expectations if you’re coming from the TV show. The novel is its own thing.
The Verdict on The Testaments
The Testaments is a very good novel that happens to be the sequel to a great one, and that shadow is both its greatest asset and its heaviest burden. Aunt Lydia’s narration is a masterclass in character complexity, and Atwood’s plotting is more propulsive than anything she’s written before. But the younger narrators are thin, the coincidences are convenient, and the resolution of Gilead’s ambiguity, while satisfying in the moment, diminishes the haunting power of the original. It’s a thriller where its predecessor was a nightmare, and readers will have strong feelings about that trade. Read it for Aunt Lydia. She’s worth the whole book.