[Editorial note: The following citations come from one-star Amazon reviews of Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale. (For the record, I think The Handmaid’s Tale is pretty great).
I’ve preserved the reviewers’ original punctuation and spelling. More one-star Amazon reviews].
shrill
Strange
no hope
anti male story
boring and odd
Feminist dogma
anti-religious zeal
poorly researched
futuristic yet dated
no good verses evil
Political propaganda
socialist point of view
Too many adjectives!!
extremely depressing
It all-around too much
tries to be all futuristic
I’m not a Christian, but
Overuse of punctuation
Sorry but no one liked it
a lot of words were used
twisted grossness and blah
Not a feminist novel for sure
Actually, it is about infertility
Written by a 12-year-old shut in
It’s hard to glean what happened
Not realistic as a futuristic fantasy
pointless exercise in self-contempt
annoying stream-of-consciousness style
these fertile women aren’t treated badly
an academic’s paranoid bondage fantasy
a lot of sexual situations and foul language
The reader is always in a confused state of mind
The main character doesn’t grow or learn anything
The author created a lot of terms but didn’t explain them
literally fills the pages by talking about grocery shopping
obviously has an ax to grind with Judeo-Christian principle
There isn’t much focus on what women are not allowed to do
Mostly just someone running errands in an American dystopia
an author who obviously doesn’t understand the passages from the Bible
main character is weak, conviction less and incapable of making any exciting moves
I’m going to bury it in the ground and let the worms eat all those words unfit for human consumption
drones on and on about brick sidewalks and rays of sunlight and tulips and blue stripes on kitchen towels
Is this supposed to be 1984, Brave New World, or even Hunger Games? If you compare it to any of those books, it is utter fail.
Biblioklept 
What was allegedly anti-Judaeo-Christian about it? I have seen the product pushed, but know nothing about it.
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[…] finishing Atwood’s novel, I indulged in a favorite treat: sifting through one-star Amazon reviews with the express purpose of rearranging lines and fragments into…somet… A complaint that arose again and again about The Handmaid’s Tale was the novel’s […]
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[…] laughed so hard at Biblioklept’s “Selections From One Star Reviews of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” My favorite: “Mostly just someone running errands in an American […]
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