Set in the visionary future of Atwood’s acclaimed Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood is at once a moving tale of lasting friendship and a landmark work of speculative fiction. In this second book of the MaddAddam trilogy, the long-feared waterless flood has occurred, altering Earth as we know it and obliterating most human life. Among the survivors are Ren, a young trapeze dancer locked inside the high-end sex club Scales and Tails, and Toby, who is barricaded inside a luxurious spa. Amid shadowy, corrupt ruling powers and new, gene-spliced life forms, Ren and Toby will have to decide on their next move, but they can’t stay locked away. (Cover and synopsis from Goodreads.)

*Warning:  This is the second book in a series.  While I really don’t like spoilers, you might find some slight Book 1 spoilers in this review.*


Because this is the second book in a series, I want to avoid spoilers, so I’m just going to share some of my notes with you, in the form of a mini review:

• I love how this book follows the group known as God’s Gardeners, which was referenced several times in Oryx and Crake.
• I also like how all the characters in this book are interconnected with characters from Oryx and Crake.
• In Oryx and Crake, we only get one POV:  Snowman/Jimmy’s.  In The Year of the Flood, we get Toby’s and Ren’s.  Toby’s is in 3rd person and Ren’s is in 1st person.
• Atwood does such a good job with the sermons of Adam One! They totally sound and feel like sermons.
• I love how in Oryx and Crake, we see the present, which is after the apocalypse, or what the God’s Gardener’s call the “Waterless Flood,” and also Jimmy’s past, which is this world divided up into poor, disease-ridden Pleeblands and the Compounds, which are rich communities with an abundance of goods.  Jimmy spent almost his entire life in the Compounds, so book one focuses on that kind of life.  But in The Year of the Flood, we also see the present day, but we get to see more about the life that went on in the Pleeblands before the apocalypse.
• The prison, Painball, reminds me of The Hunger Games.
• This book seems a lot more humorous than Oryx and Crake.
• Love this part:  “Glenn used to say the reason you can’t really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, “I’ll be dead,” you’ve said the word I, and so you’re still alive in the sentence. And that’s how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul – it was a consequence of grammar. And so was God, because as soon as there’s a past tense, there has to be a past before the past, and you keep going back in time until you get to I don’t know, and that’s what God is. It’s what you don’t know – the dark, the hidden, the underside of the visible, and all because we have grammar…”