The Year of the Flood

I'm not sure which I enjoyed more, ‘Oryx and Crake' or this book, but I definitely suggest that you read ‘Oryx and Crake' first and then follow it up with ‘The Year of the Flood.' They are both excellent dystopian novels.

I wasn't one of those that was disappointed by the way ‘Oryx and Crake' ended, but that may have been because unlike those who read it when it was first published, I knew that there was a companion novel. At any rate, I highly recommend both novels to anyone who is a fan of Atwood, or dystopian novels in general.

I read this about a year-1/2 after reading Oryx and Crake, and would recommend reading them in closer succession so that more of the interweaving of the stories ties up. I enjoyed this parallel timeline of events, and excited to dive into the 3rd book before I loose track of all the details and characters again.

A sect living on a rooftop garden. Violence and decadence on the streets. Gene spliced animals and plants. This is the grim future in Margaret Atwood???s ???The Year of the Flood???.
The book jumps backwards and forwards in time, some chapters cover the years leading up to ???The Dry Flood??? while others follow the few survivors in the months after.

I find that I have a love/hate relationship with this book, which is why it has taken me so long to write the review. The writing is excellent, the worlds well thought through, the characters believable, and still I couldn???t really enjoy it until the end. I have an aversion to sects of any kind, even ???nice??? groups like the one portrayed in this story. At first I found it confusing because a chapter describes Year 1 which I assumed to be Year 1 after The Flood. It took me several chapters to work out that it was actually Year 1 of the Sect and that the Flood didn???t happen until Year 25. Over the course of the 25 years not much seemed to happen, we had descriptions of everyday life and of how the main protagonists came to be there (and then left again) but not much else. The pace was too slow to hold my interest so I kept putting it down and reading something else. It wasn???t until the last few chapters that the pace picked up again and I became immersed in the story.
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Although well thought through, the story was just too slow for my taste. However, the premise is interesting enough to make me want to read the previous book in the trilogy ???Oryx and Crake???. This may make me want revise my opinion of ???The Year of the Flood???.

It's hard to fairly review The Year of the Flood – [b:Oryx and Crake 46756 Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam, #1) Margaret Atwood https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327896599s/46756.jpg 3143431] is a masterpiece, which will be celebrated as a timeless classic in the genre. The Year of the Flood is...not. It's not bad, but it's a far cry from Oryx and Crake. The beginning of the book, for me, was the best – I liked how Atwood fleshed out the religion of God's Gardeners, and especially liked that she primarily narrated from the point of view of Toby, who herself was cynical towards the religion. I thought it leant interesting insight into the idea of deeds-based religion versus faith-based religion, using a fictional religion to showcase the concepts. The religion itself was interesting: an attempt to merge high-level evolution and science, environmentalism and Judeo-Christian thought. I thought overall Atwood balanced the components well, and made the religion both compelling and flawed, which I appreciated.I like the main characters as well, Atwood is at her best creating nuanced female characters, and Toby is one of my favorite protagonists. Atwood relaly allows her characters to grow and evolve over the course of the novel, in a way that is very unusual and very enjoyable to read.The second half of the book, where it starts to overlap with the events in Oryx and Crake is rockier on several dimensions. First and most problematic is that Atwood makes the choice to recount overlapping events, but to do so summarily and tersely. This disrupts the flow of the novel and makes it read, in places, almost like Cliff Notes for its predecessor. The second problem is that there are multiple coincidences that end up tying together the protagonists from Year of the Flood with Oryx, Crake and Jimmy. These are far too frequent to be credible. I'm not sure if Atwood is making a narrative point by mashing the characters together in multiple ways, or if it's lazy writing. It's rare for me to find Atwood lazy, so I suspect the former, but if she's making a point, I didn't get it.Finally, I think there's an uncomfortable line here between futuristic dystopia that plays on modern themes and conspiracy-mongering. I found Oryx and Crake to be firmly in the former camp, commenting on modern issues such as corporation rights and the growing class divide through the lens of dystopian fiction, while the Year of the Flood seems to be uncomfortable close to the latter, suggesting that no one should take pharmaceuticals because of Big Pharma or trust the government in any way. And while I agree with the first set of themes, the extension in Year of the Flood is one that happens by many people in real life today and I think it's counterproductive, so reading this thinly fictionalized account was uncomfortable.

Not as good as Oryx and Crake. I found that switching between two main characters took me out of it. It's a bit odd to have one of them narrated in first person, and the other in third person. I don't think it serves any great purpose, and it only caused me to have to adjust every time the perspective changed.

My biggest problem with it is that all the minor characters that Jimmy knew and met independently in Oryx and Crake are shown to have a history together in The Year of the Flood. It was too much of a coincidence and made it seem arbitrary.

So this is a peranell novel to Oryx and Crake, and I am stil struggeling if I want that or not. In some ways I liked Jimmy, I wanted this book to also be about him and be around him more than what it actually was. I enjoyed the storyline in general. I did fall out and feel less connected with the whole way it was written ths time.
I mean I am not sure what else to write, in general I enjoyed it but unlike the first book tjis did not feel revelutionery to me. It felt at times that it did not have enought details. The storyline did not have enough depth and I wish I gotten just MORE, I was simply not obessed with this book.

“You can't live with such fears and keep on whistling. The waiting builds up in you like a tide. You start wanting it to be done with. You find yourself saying to the sky, Just do it. Do your worst. Get it over with. She could feel the coming tremor of it running through her spine, asleep or awake....”

Well. Year of the Flood. If one-quarter of the horrible things that happened in this book were to occur in the world, I would hate to still be around. A dystopia as bleak as The Road. Almost as bleak as The Road. The Road is bleak.

Let's see if I can reveal a little about the plot. The creatures of the earth are changing rapidly. A corporation is using biotechnology to merge species for their own purposes and to inflict disease on those it doesn't like. At the same time, a cult has developed that holds the creatures of the earth as sacred.

The story is told from the points of view of Ren and Toby, two young women, in alternating chapters. Other important characters are Ren's friend, Amanda; Zeb, Ren's stepfather; Jimmy, Ren's boyfriend; the Painballers, a group who seem almost without human feeling after being punished in subhuman ways; and Adam One, the leader of the cult, the Gardeners.

The story shifts from year five to year ten and on up, to year twenty-five, the year of the flood. A natural disaster (“the waterless flood”) occurs in year twenty-five and most of humanity is destroyed.

Every page made me think, about human life, about relationships, about ecology, about kindness and cruelty. A very thoughtful, if scary book.

Stunning. I was really excited to get this book and it kept me that way right to the end. After reading her “Oryx and Crake” I was already anticipating a dystopian masterpiece but this parallel story brings the two of them into the league of modern classics.
I think anyone would benefit from reading “Oryx and Crake” first, although it's not strictly necessary, but then they wouldn't get all the resonances I did.

I wish I hadn't let so much time pass between reading Oryx and Crake and this one; I had forgotten a lot, though thankfully, since this book and that one were supposed to take place simultaneously, the worlds started to overlap towards the end. I won't make the same mistake with the third book in the trilogy.

Man, Margaret Atwood knows how to paint a bleak picture, but it's still fascinating enough that you have to stop and stare. Like a train wreck.

It's really hard to define what this book is about. It's supposed to be after a biblical Flood-style event, but most of the narrative centers on the God's Gardeners cult pre-Flood and the individuals living within it. And like a lot happens, but it's kind of just life and not the whole point?

In the remainder of the narrative, the Waterless Flood has happened, humans are extinct mostly (in Oryx and Crake, a new breed of humans has been genetically created to replace humans, just as - in both books - various species of animals have been spliced together to create new animal species since so many original species have become extinct). And the remainder of the people on earth are either bad guys (Painballers) or former God's Gardeners or the new humans? Plus Ren's might-be-insane ex-boyfriend who calls himself Snowman and is a friend of all the new humans (who call themselves Crakers)?

I'm not really sure where this is going. Probably nowhere good.

This review is mainly just so I don't forget stuff before I get to the next book. I should have written something down after the first book; I remember really liking it but I don't remember why, and I have a vague notion that Year of the Flood was better, but I still didn't love it enough to give it five stars.