Book Review!

Into every life, some book reviews must fall. Hey, I'm an English major so it's to be expected. Here is today's book: The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood. Remember Oryx and Crake? While this novel happens simultaneously as good ol' Oryx and Crake. But my problem is that I think that if you haven't read O and C, this book wouldn't make a lot of sense. Well it would, but there would still be a lot of stuff that you wouldn't get. I read O and C two years ago and it still took me a while to get some of the references (for some reason, Jimmy himself didn't ring a bell but his rakunk named Killer, I immediately recognized).

But in general, it's not as good as Oryx and Crake. Though I did enjoy reading it, it was more because of how much I like the world and not the actual story. And it may be weird to say I like the world inside of the novel since it's about completely destroyed world with some pockets of people trying to survive. I usually don't like the whole post apocalyptic genre, this one has touches that I find make it very real. Like Secret Burger. Where you never know what type of meat is actually in the burgers. Though that sounds terribly disgusting (or like McDonald's), it does seem like something that would actually be popular. Especially in the poor sides of town where this novel takes place.

My real problem with this book: the ending. I really liked the ending of Oryx and Crake because it was opened ended. We didn't know who the other group of humans were or what Jimmy was actually going to do. I liked that. Though I don't remember exactly what I thought happened, but I'm sure I somehow gave it a happy ending. But Year of the Flood fills in all the blanks. Though we're still left with a "so what are they going to do now type feeling?" there's less options. There's now a group of humans left. We know who those men are. We find out what Jimmy did. I did not like that. Though there is part of me that's happy to know what happened in "the official version," I still would have preferred not to know at all.

And consider this a warning: I have a start of Canadian books lined up so forgive me if these pop up every once and a while.