Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme hosted by The Purple Booker. If you want to join in grab your current read, flick to a random page, select two sentences (without spoilers) and share them in a blog post or in the comments of The Purple Booker.
It is a phenomenon, the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, so this week’s Teaser Tuesday will acknowledge that – although, personally, the wait until March 2020 for Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light is still a trial and will be an event.
The opening of The Testaments runs thus:
Only dead people are allowed to have statues, but I have been given one while still alive. Already I am petrified.
That is a good opening.
It is.
Now I’m tempted to carry on reading. The instructions say only two sentences but it continues
This statue was a small token of appreciation for my many contributions, said the citation, which was read out by Aunt Vidala. She’d been assigned the task by our superiors, and was far from appreciative. I thanked her with as much modesty as I could summon, then pulled the rope that released the cloth drape shrouding me; it billowed to the ground, and there I stood. We don’t do cheering here at Ardua Hall, but there was some discreet clapping. I inclined my head in a nod.
My statue is larger than life, as statues tend to be, and shows me as younger, slimmer, and in better shape than I’ve been for some time. I am standing straight, shoulders back, my lips curved into a firm but benevolent smile. My eyes are fixed on some cosmic point of reference understood to represent my idealism, my unflinching commitment to duty, my determination to move forward despite all obstacles. Not that anything in the sky would be visible to my statue, placed as it is in a morose cluster of trees and shrubs beside the footpath running in front of Ardua Hall. We Aunts must not be too presumptuous, even in stone.
The Book Lovers' Sanctuary 