Reviews

Thought of giving it 4 stars because I did really enjoy this book and the entire series. I was, however, surprised at the direction this book took. It feels like the series veered off into something entirely different than what was the focus of the first book (and even the second one). The horrifying picture painted of the world in the first two books and of the morally questionable actions comitted by everyone (including some of the protagonists) have almost been forgotten in this last part of the series. The world has pretty much ended, sure, but other than that it's almost a "feel-good" happy ending with some character portraits to fill in some of the blanks.

The Crakers were hilarious though and I really enjoyed story-time with Toby.

3.5 stars

laerugo's review against another edition

Go to review page

3.0

so it pains me to say that i was disappointed by this one. or at least the ending of it. where oac and flood felt so intricately crafted and planned out well in advance of their publication (even if flood wasn't planned when oac was written), maddaddam just... didn't. and part of this is due to the fact that events are happening in real time, not as flashbacks leading up to the ending, like in the previous books. i felt excited when i finished flood, like 'finally, all the characters are in one place together, now things will start happening' - the things that happened didn't happen that often, and there was no real sense of threat aside from the pigs (which never attacked, and then oh, turns out they're good...) and the painballers, which felt more like boogeymen than real horrors.

the parts i enjoyed the most were zeb's flashbacks; his pov was one of my favorites of the entire series. along with practically any scene with jimmy and toby, because as my favorite characters, i jumped at the chance to see them interact.

which leads to my disappointment, really, because zeb and adam's story, while really well done, did not seem as... important to the main timeline as oac/flood's flashbacks did. so the best parts of the book (imo) were not always parts i felt had to be in the story, which is a really disheartening feeling. not that it wasn't super interesting to see how zeb was involved in the plot from the beginning, because that was genuinely pretty cool.

but i'm frustrated, still, with the 'resolution' of a few things. i admit i didn't think things would turn out happily ever after, but what bothered me in particular:
- there was a lot of rape in this book. or rather, the aftermath of rape. i think it's a cruel reality that the painballers would have raped ren and amanda - but why the crakers? why did atwood... let that happen? i didn't genuinely believe that in the chaos of the scene on the beach that there was even time for that to... happen (it struck me as a very fast ten second 'what-just-happened-where-did-the-painballers-go' kind of scenario), so finding out that meanwhile, the crakers were raping ren and amanda, was a surprise, and then it just made me kind of angry.
- which leads to another thing: pregnancy. there are a lot of pregnant women or new mothers at the end. and poor toby can't have kids and it's really upsetting for her and etc. which i get is a point of the book, that life should go on and human/craker life is the possible future of homo sapiens, but considering that most of these infants arrived as a byproduct of rape... it's seriously unnerving how accepted it is at the end.
- i wasn't a huge fan of toby and zeb's romance but i grew to accept it in the end just cause i liked their chemistry. but toby's jealousy of swift fox was very... juvenile and misplaced and (imo) added a lot of unnecessary schoolkid drama to a situation that i really believe toby was more sophisticated enough to handle maturely. was the point just that toby was wrong in the end? why include that at all? i started wondering if i was really reading a margaret atwood book; it felt like the kind of dumb plotline male authors throw in, like, the woman in a relationship will always be jealous/suspicious over the younger ~sluttier~ woman trying to steal her man, blah blah.
- and the very ending, the last fifty or so pages. with a book that has very little conflict, i was disappointed when they did get to the battle, we just... don't get to see it? or we get to see it through the eyes of blackbeard after it all happened. it felt a little jarring, which didn't bother me so much as the fact that it felt unpolished and just kind of lazy. i know the point here is probably to emphasize that blackbeard is becoming a new storyteller, and to emphasize that oral tradition will continue (and has to) long after the main characters are gone; but after we spend three books getting to know these characters, seeing some of them killed offscreen in such a detached way felt really just... cheap and boring. why would you spend all this time building up zeb's desire to find and save adam just to kill him in the end - adam, who we haven't seen in a book, whose side of the story we don't know, who we just found out was alive two seconds ago? and jimmy sacrificing himself for someone he doesn't know... i can buy that a little more readily because i think that jimmy was trapped in grief and would never really ever recover from losing oryx and crake. but it still really stung - even if i saw it coming - when we didn't get to really mourn him or adam, or even see the moment that it happened. (i honestly think atwood was just looking for a way to get rid of jimmy in the end, which sucks, but i get it. why would he collapse and fall to piece in this moment and not when he saw oryx and crake's bodies earlier, when he revisited rejoov at the end of oac?)
- and the epilogue. for such a strong woman, i am just. blown away by toby deciding to just walk up and die after zeb was gone. am i meant to believe the woman who survived for months by herself in anooyoo, who now had a community and purpose in it, ultimately decided to just give up and commit suicide in the forest after her husband died? like, yeah, i get it again that it's meant to be a reflection of how life will go on and the community will survive after she's gone. but it just feels wrong to read it after everything else we've seen her do and push through.

i dunno. i did enjoy it. again, zeb's pov - and jimmy's and toby's humor - were very strong points in this book's favor, and pretty much saved it from 2 stars. but i felt like this series was leading up to something great and then didn't deliver on it. where the other two books felt very well structured and thought out and had me gasping every other page, i felt like in this one, atwood just didn't know what to do with the stage she'd set up.

More...