The Year of the Flood

I just finished the last book for Environmental Lit.: The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood. This book, while technically a sequel, is really a book that runs alongside Oryx and Crake, giving more detail about the characters associated with the God's Gardeners that the first book mentions in passing a few times. Personally, I think we should've read Oryx and Crake for our last book, since it encapsulates so many of the things we talked about in class, but I can see a few themes in the sequel that it makes sense to touch on at the end of the semester.

As a book in a series, it feels superfluous. Oryx and Crake by itself was perfect, in my opinion, for this type of story. Adding onto that, especially by simply adding new perspectives on the same thing, feels like a grab for more money. But I can understand that there are good things about telling stories from different viewpoints (Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow, for instance. Those complement each other well, though I guess part of why I like that is because they eventually diverge and are supposed to come together again soon). I've even thrown around the idea of making a series of books myself that did this kind of thing--showing different perspectives or, like The Stone Gods inspired me to do, showing what happens in the same place in parallel universes (though that story was repetition, not parallel timelines; it just seemed like it was at first, so it planted the idea).

This idea does work for the book, especially since it shows two different characters' experiences of events as well as showing Jimmy from other people's perspectives. It saddened me to see the way people thought about Jimmy, since I really connected with him in the first book, but I guess that's part of the point. I don't think this book could have been as good as it was without Oryx and Crake, even though my professor said it stands on its own. A lot of it just felt pointless without already having that background. I guess it's good to show how this effects people who aren't directly involved in the destruction of humanity, but still I really wish that Atwood had either stopped with Oryx and Crake or made this book explore even more of what happens after the point the two endings connect. The third book, MaddAddam, is scheduled to come out later this year, so I guess I'll have to wait until then to see if she actually goes any further with the story.

Rating: 5.8/10