Well, this certainly won't go down with my all-time favorites, but I can't say that it was terrible, either. The only reason I chose to read it was because I did on of those on-line quiz deal where you "learn" something about your personality (what color you are, what animal you are, etc., etc.) and it said that if I was a novel, "The Handmaid's Tale" would be that novel. (See my profile).
This is somewhat science-fictionesqe, which is probably my least favorite literary genre. It tell of a United States (now called Gilead) in the late 2000's, and how powerful--and by extension, brutal--the government had become. Whatever--I refuse to be one of these people whose favorite pasttime is to complain of the evils of our country's government (although, I do have to agree with some of the groups that a Gilead like government would have banned; i.e. the ACLU; the NAACP; most all labor unions, especially teacher's unions....
I think the author took much to long to let us know how things came to be in Gilead--page 171 of a 310 page novel.
All in all, I'll release this soon, as I certainly have no plans to get back to it.