A story with a strong voice, some excellent world building, and attractive prose, but with some fundamental plot issues I found difficult to look past. 
 The sense of isolation is conveyed well through Offred's narration and colourful prose. Having the story told in the first person is very effective for submerging the reader in a legitimately frightening dystopian world. There are shades of grey everywhere and a real sense of anticipation and uncertainty around the motives of the characters; similar to Orwell's 1984 where you don't know who to trust. From the coloured cloaks the women are forced to wear to their roles as sex objects in a male dominated household, the micro-cultural details Atwood provides establish a hostile and realistic world. 
 Where in 1984 we are given a very in depth look into the nature of the oppressive regime and Big Brother, in Handmaid's Tale we are not (at least not to the same extent). While Atwood's descriptions of the ceremonies and cultural idiosyncrasies are great, it's the wider social context that is lacking. I'm all for leaving gaps in the lore of a story for the reader to speculate upon, as long as the gaps don't raise issues that have me questioning the validity of the plot. Atwood is quite miserly with information regarding how the system of subjugation came about in Gilead (which is fine) but what is there, for me, raises a number of problems. 
 According to what little information Atwood leaks throughout the story, we are supposed to believe that this system of essentially setting womens' rights back to zero came about in a matter of years. This, of course, might be possible but what information we are given doesn't feel adequate enough to explain such a radical and spontaneous shift in the values of an entire nation. There's mention of an infertility plague, a little bit of violent terrorism... and that's about it. The next thing we know, the country has been completely and almost immediately overrun by puritanical extremists. 
 Such a crucial transformation feels like something that shouldn't just be glossed over, especially since it forms the underlying foundation for the novel. These are extraordinary circumstances and really beg the question of how they came into being. I guess Atwood either didn't feel these circumstances weren't so extreme from the norm, or didn't find them interesting enough to warrant exposition. This is the entire underlying mechanism for the story. The entire revolution and subjugation is not plausible enough on the face of it without some kind of explanation, or at least a little more than what was given. Her vague exposition simply raises too many questions and answers almost none. 
 The final chapter goes a little way towards providing some kind of insight, but it still falls well short. It was a jarring conclusion that does little to actually clarify the context of the story and only serves to break the flow of the narrative. Ultimately it's a 10 page info-dump tacked onto the end of an incomplete story. It does no justice to Offred's character and only serves to distance the reader from her plight and, in some ways, trivialise what she, and every other woman in the book, went through. 
 Perhaps Atwood just wanted to focus on Offred's story, which is an interesting one, rich in character and atmosphere, but that is still no excuse for such lazy exposition. The rapidity of the change in the wider socio-economic system also seemed to be mirrored in Offred herself. At the time of telling the story, Offred is a middle-aged woman; she has experienced the majority of her life in a world where woman still had relatively equal rights, and yet she has surrendered entirely to this new regime and seems to look back on her life before as if it were 40 years ago rather than half a dozen. Her concerns for her husband and daughter (both taken from her) also seem to be a bit superficial and unconvincing. 
 Things are much different, of course, when you have a gun to your head and have been conditioned into believing you have no rights, but, we are given a direct look into Offred's thoughts on the matter and she just doesn't seem to exhibit a strong enough reaction to anything for her to really be believable. This may just be Atwood intentionally portraying a weak protagonist, and this weakness is somewhat addressed throughout the story, but still sits a little awkwardly for me. Perhaps a little more insight into the severity of the conditioning process would have helped make her seem a bit more believable and relatable. As it stands, it is hard to feel sympathetic towards such a meek and largely passive protagonist (as interesting as her voice may be) 
 It's a relatively minor point but it seems Atwood got a little carried away with her prose at times. She clearly has a penchant for similes, particularly in the first half of the book. While her writing is attractive for the most part, I counted six similes on one page at one point. In and of themselves the comparisons she draws aren't bad but they certainly lose their impact when she lathers them on so thick. 
 I really wanted to enjoy the story. I did, for the most part, but there needed to be a more fleshed out conclusion and believable explanation for how things came to be for the story to be truly satisfying. I get the feeling that if Atwood had simply set the story further in the future, things would have felt more believable. Even if she'd just entirely dropped the last chapter, that piece of enormously clunky yet vague exposition, it would have been a better story, still incomplete, but better.