The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

I expected Margaret Atwood's new book, The Year of the Flood, to pick up where her last novel, Oryx and Crake left off. But Atwood had better ideas. Instead, this story runs parallel to the tale told in Oryx and Crake. The Year of the Flood has two narrators, Ren and Toby, who cross paths many times. Both women struggle in a world that offers little hope to individuals with no official Identity. They each live for a while with God's Gardeners, a fringe religious sect that has deep respect for animal life and is obsessed with environmental conservation. After an apocalyptic plague, the "waterless flood," kills most of the human race, each woman uses the survival skills she learned with the sect.

Usually narratives that switch from one speaker to another seem gimmicky. That is not the case here. Ren and Toby's stories enhance each other; neither would be as gripping without the details provided by the other. Atwood switches from one narrator's voice to another seamlessly, and there is never any confusion as to who is speaking. Atwood also invents her own lexicon, and her command of language is so perfect that one naturally intuits the meanings of her fabricated words. She distills words into their simplest forms, and this dumbed-down language reveals so much about the culture that uses it.

It's exciting when key characters from Oryx and Crake begin to appear. Placing Ren and Toby's experiences into a larger context makes the story even more satisfying. And seeing the vastly different ways that men and women experience the same events is sad and sometimes funny. This story is well-crafted, unpredictable, and impossible to put down. Are there other humans left in Ren and Toby's world? And if so, will the women survive long enough to find them? To find out, read The Year of the Flood.

To place a hold on this book today, go to the Brentwood Library's website, search our catalog for the book, click "Details," and then click "Place hold."
www.brentwood-tn.org/library