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This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at SBU chapter.

This weekend my Tik Tok fyp was full of videos on books to read before they are banned. Whether these books get banned or not is still up in the air, but almost all of these videos featured one of my favorite books: “The Handmaid’s Tale”. 

“The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood is a futuristic dystopian book. The premise is that an extreme religious group overthrew the United States government, and then implemented their own government, in which women had little to no rights. 

I first read the book my senior year of high school. I was in a literature class, and our final assignment was to either find a new piece of literature or use one we had read in class and write an essay about the literature in terms of the different literary theories we had learned about.

“The Handmaid’s Tale” was on my TBR list, and I figured I would write about the book through feminist literary theory. I had given myself multiple days to read the book, but I ended up finishing it in one sitting. 

I loved how the narrator, whose name we never find out, has found a way to survive in the messed up society that she was forced into, while still remembering her past, and having her own little rebellions like looking at magazines with her Commander watching or sleeping with the driver. 

There is also a show based on the book. I have seen some of the show, and it was good, but I felt that the book was better. The show goes further than the book does because in order to keep the show running, they had to extend the story, but I liked how the book ended in a sort of uncertainty. The show also gave a name to the main character, which is a name mentioned in the book that many assume is the handmaid’s name, but never actually confirmed. 

If you are not into reading though, the show still has the same message that the book does, just a more dramatized version. 

The book serves as a reminder, to me at least, about what could happen if we silence women or let extremists take over. Is the book fictional? Yes. Is the book an extreme telling of what could happen? Yes, it is. But that does not mean that it would not happen in real life. 

I have my fingers crossed that “The Handmaid’s Tale” is not banned, so that others can read it and love it like I did. 

Stephanie is a new member of St. Bonaventure's Her Campus. She plans to write about politics, music, pop culture, college and life in general. Stephanie is a senior political science major and a communication minor. She is also the SBU College Democrats Student Government Representative, Vice President of the SBU Fitness Club, and a member of the SBU Dance Team. In her free time, Stephanie likes to hang with her friends, watch The West Wing, listen to her favorite artists which include Niall Horan, Taylor Swift, and Isak Danielson, and walk with her mom and dog. Stephanie can frequently be found with an Iced Matcha Latte in her hand.