The Year of the Flood

, #2

by

First United States Edition, 434 pages

English language

Published Sept. 22, 2009 by Doubleday Nan A. Talese.

ISBN:
978-0-385-52877-1
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4 stars (5 reviews)

The times and species have been changing at a rapid rate, and the social compact is wearing as thin as environmental stability. Adam One, the kindly leader of the God's Gardeners--a religion devoted to the melding of science and religion, as well as the preservation of all plant and animal life--has long predicted a natural disaster that will alter Earth as we know it. Now it has occurred, obliterating most human life. Two women have survived: Ren, a young trapeze dancer locked inside the high-end sex club Scales and Tails, and Toby, a God's Gardener barricaded inside a luxurious spa where many of the treatments are edible.

Have others survived? Ren's bioartist friend Amanda? Zeb, her eco-fighter stepfather? Her onetime lover, Jimmy? Or the murderous Painballers, survivors of the mutual-elimination Painball prison? Not to mention the shadowy, corrupt policing force of the ruling powers...

Meanwhile, gene-spliced life forms are proliferating: …

23 editions

reviewed The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood (MaddAddam, #2)

Review of 'The Year of the Flood' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

another one devoured - over 3 days this time as i had a busier weekend :)
this one was focused on 2 women and, again, atwood nails the complexities of jealousy and vulnerability among female friends.
she weaves the oryx and crake story in and out and it makes you want to re-read her first book to see if characters interpret events differently (i say they do). in many ways it was a better book (since i'd already bought into the dystopia and wanted more) and had a nice religious theme with the god's gardeners. but it also was infinitely sadder - with women front and centre, we are continually reminded of their vulnerability to sadist and/or sexual abuse - both before and after the apocalypse.

reviewed The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

Review of 'The Year of the Flood' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

I got a little lost in the characters and meandering plot halfway into this one, but I've enjoyed the world Atwood has created - as imaginative as those of Lucas, Tolkien, and Rowling. And it gets an extra star for inspiring a real-life record of many of the hymns (also on Spotify). yearoftheflood.com/us/music/

reviewed The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood (MaddAddam, #2)

Review of 'The Year of the Flood' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Atwood's writing, freed from the exacting confines of her more lauded 'literary' works, is exemplary, and her skills at world-building are terrific. The world of Flood is a lonely and terrifying place, and Atwood details with precision exactly the path humanity took to get there. The near-future is a place of corporate-run government (particularly the omnipresent CorpSeCorps), where animal species are dying out at the rate of hundreds a month, and science and religion battle over who gets the hearts and minds of the citizenry. Far more so than Oryx and Crake (which mentioned God's Gardeners only briefly), Atwood concentrates on the religious aspect of humanity's future, a future of strange offshoots of accepted religious practices, sometimes with exceedingly strange results. But Atwood does not take the easy path and subject the beliefs of her characters to ridicule (and how easy that would have been). Her sensitive treatment of the …

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Subjects

  • Environmental disasters -- Fiction
  • Regression (Civilization) -- Fiction