By Huang Beihua (20A03A) and Sarah Lok (20A03A) 

Wondering what to get for your loved ones for Christmas? To us, books certainly make great gifts. And you’re in the right place—Raffles Reads is a new column which aims to promote reading culture among Singaporean students. The books, reviewed by Raffles Press writers, have been provided courtesy of Times Reads.

From Ireland to Argentina, the Handmaid has gained rapid popularity in women’s rights protests of recent years. A future dystopian state where women are institutionally enslaved as “two-legged wombs”, the totalitarian misogyny of Gilead evoked by these red-clad figures offers a chilling warning to our world today. Yet, the question remains that, if Margaret Atwood’s prophecy is to be averted, then how would it be? In other words, how would Gilead fall? 

That is the question Atwood sets out to answer in her latest book, The Testaments. And it is certainly an answer in urgent demand—a copy was sold every four seconds in the UK in its opening week, while American buyers ordered more than 125,000 barely a day after its launch. 

By Claire Tan (20S07A) and Valerie Tan (20A01E)

Wondering what to get for your loved ones for Christmas? To us, books certainly make great gifts. And you’re in the right place—Raffles Reads is a new column which aims to promote reading culture among Singaporean students. The books, reviewed by Raffles Press writers, have been provided courtesy of Times Reads.

Your life, or your beloved’s?

This is the dilemma that the characters of Wicked Fox grapple with—similar to hundreds of other Young Adult books, perhaps, but with a Korean mythological twist.

Written in alternating points of view from its two main characters, together with stories of the first gumiho (a nine-tailed fox from Korean mythology) interspersed between its chapters, Wicked Fox is the first in the Gumiho series by Kat Cho. Against the backdrop of modern-day Seoul, it follows Miyoung, a half-gumiho, half-human who has to devour the energy of people—and thus kill them—to stay alive. One night, she stumbles upon Jihoon, a boy her age, being attacked by a goblin. She risks revealing her true identity just to save him, but ends up losing her fox bead—her gumiho soul—in the process. This sends Miyoung and Jihoon spiralling into an adventure they can’t control, and soon they find themselves surrounded by enemies and a looming ultimatum: Miyoung’s immortality, or Jihoon’s life.