So much hype, so much noise surrounding this book. At the end, I now have two main thoughts: firstly, I don't think it is worthy of a (shared) Booker Prize win; and secondly, I find it hard to believe that a person (Aunt Lydia) could act the way she did and not get caught in such a society, ultimately bringing Gilead crumbling down.
If you are willing to suspend your disbelief and run with the story that, yes, she was simply biding her time and waiting for the appropriate moment to seek her revenge and cause the entire structure of Gilead to fall, then this is a great story. And in that sense, I romped through this book. However, it falls far short of Margaret Atwood's other novels - the majority of which I have loved simply because there is no neat resolution at the end.
Unfortunately, this feels like a book written to tie in with the tv series and to answer the question posed at the end of the first novel: how did Gilead fall? And for me, not knowing Offred's fate and what caused such a society to fail were what made The Handmaid's Tale such a brilliant and chilling read.