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One day Daisy attends an anti-Gilead rally against her parents’ wishes. Daisy wrote an essay on Baby Nicole, a child who was “stolen” by her handmaid mother and taken to Canada, and is now held up by Gileadeans as a symbol of the evil that exists outside its borders. Gilead is a constant topic of political conversation in her school. Daisy is a teenager living in Toronto with oddly overprotective parents who run a second-hand clothing store. The third narrator is brand new - again, sort of. If it sounds like she might be Offred’s daughter - the one who was ripped from her arms as she and her husband Luke attempted an escape to Canada - well, you might be onto something.
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And she has vague memories of running through the woods with an unknown woman as a young child. But when her mother dies, she learns that she once had another mother: a woman now serving as a handmaid. She’s growing up in a nice house with her mother and father, a powerful Commander, and learning the duties she will be expected to uphold as a wife. Agnes Jemima was too young when Gilead took power to remember what life was like before it. The second narrator is another person we know from the original, but not nearly as well. Through Lydia’s narration, Atwood allows us access to a mind far more complex, with many more shades of grey, than her original novel let on. Such women are rare, and dangerously underestimated, in Gilead. As Atwood points out to TIME, Lydia is a woman of secret yet significant power in the regime. Lydia’s narration comprises the meatiest third of The Testaments, the one most revealing of Gilead’s inner workings, because she sees - and records - everything. Edgar Hoover, who collected dirt on everybody?” To flesh out Lydia’s story, Atwood says she asked herself, “How do you get to be such a person? How do you act within that structure? What are your fears, what are your goals, when you’re in that position channeling J. (TIME recently revealed that Dowd also reads the role in the audiobook edition of The Testaments.) In the new book, Atwood complicates readers’ long-held assumptions about Lydia, who trains women to become handmaids and often adds to their misery with her abusive tactics. She’s since been brought to life by Ann Dowd in Hulu’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale. So who are these women? One of the three narrators is someone readers already know: Aunt Lydia, a notorious villain in the original book. But once she realized she could access Gilead through different characters, she knew she could write a follow-up. “She had said her piece, quite thoroughly,” Atwood says. One of the reasons Atwood waited as long as she did to write a sequel, she tells TIME, was because she felt re-creating Offred’s voice would be impossible. The new book does not drop back into the mind of the woman who first described to us all the horrific customs of Gilead. Fans who hoped Offred, the narrator of The Handmaid’s Tale, might be one of the three will be disappointed. When she announced The Testaments, Atwood teased that the new novel is narrated by three women, but she revealed nothing of their identities. “So it’s those three: the witness, the will and ‘I’m telling you the truth.’” Who are the narrators of The Testaments ? And what does a witness give? A testimony, but also a testament,” she says. “It has several different meanings: last will and testament, Old and New Testaments.
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Why is the book called The Testaments ?Ītwood has a three-pronged answer to this question, drawing on the structure of the novel - which is told by three narrators - and the religious aspects of Gilead. But this is Atwood we’re talking about, and nothing is ever as simple as it seems.