“What do they study now, our girls? A bit of addition and subtraction, telling time, making change. Counting, of course. They would learn counting first. All the way up to one hundred.”

Dr Jean McClellan, along with every other woman in America, has been silenced. Limited to 100 words a day, women are controlled by Government decrees. Bracelets are to be worn at all times, if a woman goes over her 100 word limit the bracelet will subject them to an electric shock which gets worse with every extra word spoken. This leads to a world where women cannot work and girls are no longer taught how to read and write. With only 100 words to make herself heard, can Jean reclaim her voice and change the lives of millions of women affected.

I really wanted to like this book, but I am so sad to say that I didn’t. I wouldn’t say that it was a particularly bad book but I struggled to get through it and wouldn’t want to read it again. I found the writing style quite easy to get along with but I felt like there was too much going on. Instead of focusing on the subject at heart the author appears to go off on a tangent especially in relation to a really farfetched relationship, which to me just didn’t make any sense. I found myself willing this book to end so I could put it down and I could move on. It has been described as a “petrifying re-imagining of the Handmaids Tale”, I wouldn’t say that it was a reimagining more like an exact copy apart from it being slightly more modern. I didn’t enjoy the Handsmaid Tale when I read it so maybe that should have been a warning sign with regards to not liking this book. I would recommend that people give this book a go because the concept is very interesting, I’m just so disappointed that it wasn’t written in a different way. I’ve given this book 3 stars because the Handmaids Tale got 2 stars and I did enjoy it slightly more.