The Year of the Flood (The Maddaddam Trilogy, #2)

by Margaret Atwood

[brokentune]

2.5*

This is a combined review of the trilogy. Well, not so much a review as just a few thoughts.

"But hatred and viciousness are addictive. You can get high on them. Once you've had a little, you start shaking if you don't get more."

When Oryx & Crake was first published, I could not put it down. It was my first Atwood, none of my friends knew about her (I was still at uni at the time) and people thought I was on the crazy train when it didn't win the Booker.

Strangely, my impressions of Oryx & Crake kept me from reading the other two books in the trilogy as soon as they were published, and I only managed to remedy this over the past couple of months.
I kinda wish I hadn't. Not that Year of the Flood and MaddAddam were bad books - the writing was exquisite - but they did not hold the same punch as O&C which is basically "Snowman, the Jimmy"s story.
Being Snowman, the story is slightly mad and told by a madman. I never really knew whether to believe him or not, and that made reading quite fantastic.

Year of the Flood is basically the companion piece told from the view of Toby, a tough but sane, survivor of the Flood. While Toby's story and the of her fellow survivors is interesting, it merely adds to the existing world that Atwood created in O&C.

MaddAddam stretched this even further. Unfortunately, by this time, I had learned about all I wanted to know about the Flood and the aftermath and the Crakers.

By the end, I was only wondering why we needed book 3 at all? I wish she had rolled books 2 and 3