This was really a 2 1/2 stars. It might even be a three but honestly I was so disappointed in the book it left me bewildered. It was just no where near as good as the first one. It was also filled with a lot of old themes. I have read a lot of science fictions books that covered this subject and felt way more unique. I am guessing this book will be fine for others but reading it so soon after the first one it felt hollow. ( )

Interesting, thought-provoking and disturbing. Not nearly as good as Oryx and Crake, and definitely should be read after the same. This dystopian world book is a powerful, skillfully written commentary on our current experiences. ( )

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.

( )

A fringe religious group is teaching about environmental harmony in a world that is progressively becoming more tightly controlled, more wasteful, and more out of sync with the environment around it. Looking ahead to the end of the world, their prophet, Adam One, warns that the apocalypse is coming and attempts to prepare his flock of misfits and scientists by teaching how to live at one with the world they once used thoughtlessly.

Margaret Atwood’s books are startling cautionary tales, situations currently happening in the world taken to extremes. In A Handmaid’s Tale, it was warning of taking religion too far; in this book, it’s wastefulness. This book is a spinoff of Oryx and Crake, a novel that takes place in parallel to the world of The Year of the Flood, and a few of the main characters of Oryx and Crake have brief cameos, though the storyline is not similar.

I do, however, have some complaints. I must temper them with the warning that I have been a consummate fan of both Atwood’s and of the genre of speculative fiction as a whole, and that I do appreciate this book.
-First, this book was sometimes hard to follow. The narrative would skip through time periods and characters in a manner that I occasionally found incredibly frustrating; I would end up losing track and skipping back to the beginning of the chapters just to find out who and when I was reading about.
-Second, the tempo of the narrative was amazingly slow – and then when the end of the world happened, it was skimmed over in a couple of pages just to find a ponderous aftermath that did not feel anywhere near as dire as the situation demanded it to be.
-Third, I never really clicked with the characters. I think the only one who really grabbed hold of me was Toby, but I couldn’t make myself care about the fates of anyone else. This is not to say that they are not fleshed out fully – if anything, the opposite is true. Atwood truly did her best to make her these environmental hippies cum end of the world religious activists seem particularly human, and this is one of her strengths. They just didn’t matter much to me.
-Fourth, there were a couple of plot holes that absolutely drove me insane. I got to them, and I’d end up stopping to dwell on them to try and figure out explanations. I really felt like I’d been jerked out of the story to try and figure out her literary devices.

Noting those things, I would also like to say that while I enjoyed this book, it wasn’t for the reasons most people would.

I always find Atwood’s writing to be something like a meditation. It’s got a comfortable, calm rhythm to it, and forces itself to work at its own pace through your head, which can sometimes be somewhat disconcerting. The diction is amazingly believable; it’s amazing how lifelike the mental conversation can be. Her writing is what I resort to if I’m anxious – even if she is writing about disturbing situations, it is always in a methodical, lyrical manner that forces you to be calm when you think about it. Maybe I’m silly to think of it in that manner, but I will always appreciate that characteristic of her writing, that earthy, deliberate contemplation of existence.

Atwood’s writing also pairs amazingly well with that of Sheri S. Tepper’s; Atwood is a master of the first person account of a disaster, Tepper that of the third person. Often, what they write about is similar and with that sort of sideways take on what is current in the world, though Tepper’s are usually placed in a much more unfamiliar setting.

Would I recommend this book? Certainly, to those who truly enjoy the genre of speculative fiction. Will I be rereading it endlessly like I did A Handmaid’s Tale? Probably not; while I enjoyed it, it’s not compelling enough to want to revisit. ( )

I loved the themes of conservation and vegetarianism in this novel, but the story itself just didn't cut it. A world wide epidemic strikes the earth wiping out virtually all of humanity, but somehow all the main characters in the novel, no matter where they are, seem to survive. I mean, c'mon... ( )