The Year of the Flood

This weekend I finished The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood, the sequel to Oryx and Crake which is one of my all time favorite books. I’ve been a fan of Atwood’s work for quite a while, ever since I read her mesmerizing Alias Grace but although some of her novels are utterly brilliant like Oryx and Crake (which should be mandatory reading material for everyone!) and The Blind Assassin, others are boring to mediocre at best such as The Handmaid’s Tale (average), The Robber Bride (went on and on) or The Penelopiad (just don’t go there). I may love and loathe her work in equal measures but she’s still one of my favorite authors because when she’s good, she’s damn good!

And The Year of the Flood was good. As I said, it’s a sequel to her dystopic masterpiece Oryx and Crake in which Snowman, who lives in a tree, must take care of the Children of Crake, peaceful little green people who are the only survivors of an experiment gone wrong. It’s actually quite difficult to summarize this novel because so much wacky stuff happens in this strange and sensational tale that is as entertaining as it is thought-provoking and without a doubt one of the most original stories I’ve ever read. Needless to say, the heat was on to make the sequel equally good and it is, almost.

The story is gripping and funny, just like the characters who have to make the best of a world that has been genetically altered and obliterated. There’s some drama, a touch of honesty and humanity, a tad of evironmental awareness and lots of excitement in a terrifying yet completely realistic sci-fi setting which makes her works a little out there but still very plausible and easy to relate to. Even if you don’t like sci-fi, it will lure you in and devour you. The only reason why it’s not as good as its predecessor for me, is because I was already familiar with this weird world that completely blew me away the first time round but other than that, all hail queen Atwood.