SEPTEMBER 2013 - AudioFile
Earnest, cynical, scathing: With these varied narrative approaches, Bernadette Dunne, Bob Walter, and Robbie Daymond perfectly capture the complexities of Atwood’s last installment in her MaddAddam Trilogy. The first section of the audiobook provides a clear-eyed, nearly (maybe not quite) hopeful view of this postapocalyptic world so as to pull the listener in, regardless of any familiarity with the two previous titles. Subsequent sections dramatize all the horrors of human nature with harsh realism and suspense. All three narrators offer taut performances with grab-you-by-the-throat vocal energy, driving dialogue, and brutal momentum. Together, the three narrators create a dizzying, somewhat impressionistic, portrait of a future that contemporary humankind seems to be preparing itself for. L.B.F. 2014 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine
Margaret Atwood's new novel can be read as the dramatic conclusion of the trilogy that began with Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, but it possesses enough resonance of its own to be read as a standalone. Certainly, as rendered by the talented Canadian author, the ongoing struggle of Toby, Zeb, Ren, and Amanda to survive in a post-apocalyptic world holds our fervent attention. (P.S. Atwood is renowned as the creator of literary science fiction. Among her honors is an Arthur C. Clarke Award.)
Publishers Weekly
The final entry in Atwood’s brilliant MaddAddam trilogy roils with spectacular and furious satire. The novel begins where Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood end, just after most of the human species has been eradicated by a man-made plague. The early books explore a world of terrifying corporate tyranny, horrifying brutality, and the relentless rape of women and the planet. In Oryx and Crake, the pandemic leaves wounded protagonist Jimmy to watch over the Crakers, a humanoid species bioengineered to replace humankind by the man responsible for unleashing the plague. In The Year of the Flood, MaddAddamites wield science to terrorize corporate villains while God’s Gardeners use prayer and devotion to the Earth to prepare for the approaching cataclysm. Toby, a God’s Gardener and key character in the second book, narrates the third installment, in which a few survivors, including MaddAddamites, God’s Gardeners, Jimmy, and the Crakers, navigate a postapocalyptic world. Toby is reunited with Zeb, her MaddAddamite romantic interest in Year of the Flood, and the two become leaders and defenders of their new community. The survivors are a traumatized, cynical group with harshly tested self-preservation skills, but they have the capacity for love and self-sacrifice, which in a simpler story would signal hope for the future of humankind. However, Atwood dramatizes the importance of all life so convincingly that readers will hesitate to assume that the perpetuation of a species as destructive as man is the novel’s central concern. With childlike stubbornness, even the peaceful Crakers demand mythology and insist on deifying people whose motives they can’t understand. Other species genetically engineered for exploitation by now-extinct corporations roam the new frontier; some are hostile to man, including the pigoons—a powerful and uniquely perceptive source of bacon and menace. Threatening humans, Crakers, and pigoons are Painballers—former prisoners dehumanized in grotesque life-or-death battles. The Crakers cannot fight, the bloodthirsty Painballers will not yield, and the humans are outnumbered by the pigoons. Happily, Atwood has more surprises in store. Her vision is as affirming as it is cautionary, and the conclusion of this remarkable trilogy leaves us not with a sense of despair at mankind’s failings but with a sense of awe at humanity’s barely explored potential to evolve. Agent: Phoebe Larmore, Larmore Literary Agency. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
"The final entry in Atwood’s brilliant MaddAddam trilogy roils with spectacular and furious satire ... Her vision is as affirming as it is cautionary, and the conclusion of this remarkable trilogy leaves us not with a sense of despair at mankind’s failings but with a sense of awe at humanity’s barely explored potential to evolve."
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Ten years after Oryx & Crake rocked readers the world over, Atwood brings her cunning, impish, and bracing speculative trilogy—following The Year of the Flood—to a gritty, stirring, and resonant conclusion ... Atwood is ascendant, from her resilient characters to the feverishly suspenseful plot involving battles, spying, cyberhacking, murder, and sexual tension ... The coruscating finale in an ingenious, cautionary trilogy of hubris, fortitude, wisdom, love, and life’s grand obstinacy."
—Booklist
Library Journal
In this wrap-up to the magisterial trilogy begun with Oryx & Crake and continued with The Year of the Flood, a waterless flood has wiped out most of humanity. While Ren and Toby have returned to the MaddAddamite cob house, the story really belongs to Zeb, who searches for God's Gardeners founder Adam One as his own past is disclosed.
