A review by anna_hepworth
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

It's been a week since I finished reading this, and I still don't know what I want to say about it. It is very clever, and I'm glad I read it, but I did rather spend a lot of time wondering why I was reading it. The writing holds the attention, but I really did not appreciate the viewpoint character, the world building, or much of the plot. Which is not to say that I think this could have been done better, just that I put the book down and grumbled away from it a lot. Not least because I was never convinced by the setting -- either pre- or post-apocalypse -- because it was all too weirdly glossy. I get that some of that was the fact that the viewpoint character came from a place of privilege that they hadn't really questioned, and thus their assumptions about the way that other people lived were dodgy. But I also felt like that about the characters, that they were caricatures or archetypes rather than people. 

So, worth it as reading for the language, and interesting in a way of seeing what the literary end of science fiction is doing with the end of the world doom saying, but I don't think I actually recommend it more generally.