I devoured The Giver last month and almost fainted when I heard that Lois Lowry wrote more books in the series. So of course it was off to my local library to put in a request because EVERYONE IS READING IT. I can see why–this book isn’t exactly a sequel, but it does provide some unusual counterpoint to the Stepfordian world Jonas inhabited in The Giver. Gathering Blue begins with Kira, who is mourning the sudden death of her mother. She is crippled with a […]
Is Mankind Capable of Remaking Itself, asks Atwood
This final book in the trilogy offers a hopeful conclusion to Atwood’s frankly horrific depiction of our possible future. Maddaddam is the name of an action-oriented splitoff from the God’s Gardeners cult who—together with Crake’s bioengineered “children” who survived the so-called waterless flood that wiped most of humanity off the face of Earth—drive the action of this last book. While the Maddaddam survivors forage the ruins of their civilization for such things as tampons and flashlight batteries, they also learn how to raise a new […]
End of the World as Told by the Survivors
Unexpectedly, Atwood does not pick up in Year of the Flood where Oryx and Crake ended. Rather, she covers the same time-line as she did in her first novel, only this time she gives us a different viewpoint with which to greet the end of the world. In her first book, we learned that the world’s corporations had hired brilliant men—Crake among them—to bioengineer humanity in their own image—materialist, hedonistic, narcissistic. The profits have never been so good, the disparities between rich and poor never […]
Another Grim Dystopic Future by Atwood
Another of Atwood’s famous dystopic novels, this one the first in a trilogy based on an apocalyptic future after the genetic manipulators and profit-mongers have prompted a sort-of “Noah’s Flood” in the form of an engineered plague to wipe the slate clean. Crake, the genius who created the plague, is gone but his “children” live on as a handful of bioengineered innocents intended to repopulate the world under new—Crake’s– guidelines. Crake’s appointed “shepherd” for this flock is Jimmy, now known as the Snowman, who managed […]