The Handmaid's Tale has this funny attribute of simultaneously being a short novel and a long novel: it is short, with only about 400 pages on my ebook reader; but it's long because it is densely written, its text occupying almost all of the space, leaving no room for a pause except when a chapter ends and a new one follows. All the same I surprised myself for finishing this novel in such a short span of time; apart from its relative density, there's also the fact that it's not my kind of book: I'm not really into dystopian literature. All those strange jargons and strange world-buildings and strange names exhaust me. They consume at least a quarter of the book. 
 With The Handmaid's Tale I got the same treatment. The jargon is there and the strange names are there. The only thing it lacks is the world-building. I'm giving this 4 stars because as much as world-building exhausts me I believe it's vital in a dystopian novel. This book's lack of establishment of the world it is set in instantly plucks that one star that would have made this book a five-star read for me. I once read an article on world-building in fiction, in which the author points out that one mistake that writers (especially those in the speculative fiction) make in their world-building: writing a dystopian story in a not-so-dystopian setting. The setting for The Handmaid's Tale doesn't sound much different from any other place in the world; the only outstanding detail it has is the Wall that surrounds them, which is not enough. 
 I consider Fahrenheit 451 as one of those science fiction novels with a well-established setting. It transported me to a place quite different from the boring shithole I live in. The Handmaid's Tale, despite its strange names and jargon, failed to do that. It felt like any other generic place in the world. And I doubt I can go anywhere with this issue. Someone, a die-hard fan, could shut me up by telling me this was deliberately done to give the reader a sense of disturbing familiarity to what has happened in the past and what might be happening today. Either way, this novel's world-building is poorly done, just the same. 
 Surprisingly, The Handmaid's Tale did not bore me to sleep, despite its slow, uneventful plot development. I'm next to innumerate but if I could make a pig statistics (derived from pig Latin) I'd say 90% of the book is monologue and only 10% is action. Quotation marks are sparse here; it can go on and on with monologue for at least 50 pages before we are granted a dialogue. I can't say I enjoyed being inside the protagonist's head because all she had to offer was blurry snapshots of her pre-Gilead past life (blurry snapshots because they're incomplete and undetailed, as she refused to tell her past) and thoughts of escape and hatred toward her captors. It was more like interesting to know what was going on in her head; plus, for a narrator, she is quite eloquent (kudos to Atwood). Back to the plot, I felt a little cheated on by the ending. I did not expect the book to end that way. I'm not talking about a plot twist, a raisin at the end of the hotdog, no. I'm talking about what my high school English teacher called "a hanging ending." This is very frustrating and a little too much to handle: when the writer places the story in the hands of the reader. Oh well, I'd like to think Offred, our protagonist, escaped and lived happily ever after. She deserved it. 
 Well-written, no doubt. The prose is no-nonsense yet it manages to sound creatively polished. Margaret Atwood knows her words and she uses them effectively in this novel. All in all, a very fascinating book. Four stars!