A Monkey Book Report

This book is more the corollary to Ms. Atwood's previous book Oryx and Crake than it is the sequel. The action in The Year of the Flood takes place simultaneously to that of Oryx and Crake, so that's why I say that.

This novel like, it's predecessor, is a bleak vision of a world gone mad and then made barren by corporate science. We learn the stories of Toby, a woman, and Ren, a young girl, and how they navigate the plague, or waterless flood as it's called in their religion, God's Gardeners. Atwood tells their stories of their lives before, during, and after their initiation in to their apocalyptic religion and the effects it has on their friends and family.

This book, like Oryx, is a dystopian science fiction view of how things might end if we stay on the same path of the genetic engineering of animals and plants and if we stay on the path of non stop consumption we've locked ourselves into. Most readers and reviewers found these two books too bleak for their tastes but I highly enjoyed them, being a fan of dystopian literature and film that I am. When I finished Oryx and saw that Snowman wasn't the last man on earth I knew that somehow Atwood would not leave us hanging with the image of an infected sick, both physically and emotionally, man as the last human on the planet. She may have a jaundiced eye and a cynic's worldview but in the end she's hopeful about humanity, the ending of The Handmaid's Tale echos my point. And in fact I would not be surprised if Ms. Atwood doesn't write a book that bridges these two into the world she fashioned at the end of The Handmaid's Tale.

I recommend this book but I can see why others would not like it. It might be a bit too dark for some.