Quite a depressing book, really. Atwood spends about the first 2/3 of the book showing how terrible Offred's life is, before she starts to find more interesting stuff to do, which is about 1/3 too much time spent so depressingly. The religious element was an intriguing new thing that I haven't seen in other dystopian novels. This is kind of like 1984 crossed with The Scarlet Letter (I'm sure I'm not the first person to make that parallel). I appreciated the epilogue, which explains a bit about how this society came to be, and what happened to it.