Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

By -
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood



                A plague has destroyed mankind leaving Jimmy with the Children of Crake, Crakers as he calls them. Crake is dead. Oryx is dead. It’s just Jimmy, the Crakers, and the genetic experiments like, pigoons, wolvogs, snats and rakunks. People had been pushing the boundaries with playing God for decades. The pleeblands had become cesspools for disease. Those who lived on compounds or modules were relatively safe because of the air purifiers. The vaccines were being created almost as fast as the diseases were spreading. Crake had theories about why that was before he died. That was before he created the Crakes, a species immune to diseases that held none of the human weaknesses.
This is not a world I know. This is not a future I want. This is a world that envisions man at its breaking point because of the actions of man. We are to blame. This was highly interesting. From the beginning of this novel I was intrigued and invested. I spent most of the novel simply trying to figure how man got to this point. After reading this I almost feel like I really enjoy puzzles because Atwood made me work till the very end to find out how the world collapsed. She left breadcrumbs throughout the story, jumping from Jimmy’s current situation to the past, all leading up the outbreak of the ultimate outbreak. I had my suspicions throughout but finding out the truth made this whole story worthwhile.

I am a fan of Atwood but I wasn’t sure if this was a novel I wanted to start. Oryx and Crake is the first of a trilogy, that I will more than likely finish because I found this whole story line extremely fascinating. The main character of Jimmy was well developed and interesting. The whole concept of a complete separation of society between those that live on compounds versus those in the pleeblands just grabbed my intention. The extent to which humans began genetically modifying creatures all for the benefit of mankind was horrifying and yet well thought out. I loved that everything was a mystery that was slowly unfolding. The results were unexpected and disturbing. This was a weird fit to me but Atwood knows how to sow an alternate reality. I give this 4 out of 5 stars. I didn’t know what to expect but I enjoyed this science fiction(ish), dystopia. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt by Steve Johnson

By -
Image
Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt by Steve Johnson Bringing to life the story of a notorious pirate to a modern audience isn’t an easy task. We’re too used to the comfort of easy travel, the mythos of pirates and the commercialized imagery produced by movies and television. Images of Jack Sparrow and Long John Silver have been part of entertainment for so long that the idea of true piracy and all it’s ruthlessness has almost been washed away. It isn’t until you’re able to wash away the false images and submerge yourself into the actual history that you can see piracy for it’s truly brutal nature. It also brings up many questions about governments, laws, corporations, scandal, colonization and other factors that allowed piracy to flourish and exist in the manner that it did for so long. Piracy didn’t exist in a bubble. Enemy of All Mankind takes the story of one pirate, who helped usher in the Golden Age of Piracy, and exa
Read more

Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest by Ian Zack

By -
Image
Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest by Ian Zack          In my case it is always the image of Odetta that comes to mind when I hear her name. The tall, undeniably Black woman, hair in an afro, guitar in hand. It must be that I simply did not know enough about her life, her struggle, and even her music to convey more than that image. But her image is memorable and her presence something not easily described. This book fills in the gaps in the story of Odetta that I didn’t know. Looking back at my childhood, her most memorable songs are the ones I’ve known most of my life, singing in my school’s chapel along with hundreds of other Black students, the words having meaning that I can only truly comprehend decades later as a Black woman.          Zack takes his time with this biography, letting the readers learn as much about Odetta as we do the time from whence she came. Her migration from Alabama to California, her feelings of coming from a loveless, forced marriage,
Read more

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

By -
Image
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood I’m going to cut right to the chase. This book is well written but we didn’t need it. I expected more. I wanted more and this fell flat. I’ve read The Handmaid’s Tale , more than once, and I genuinely enjoyed it. The single narrative of Offred lent itself to the story well and it was genuinely a terrifying society. I watched the first two series of the show and though I have my reservations about it, I still thought it was a good show. It does a great job answering questions that the book could not because of its singular narrative. It filled out the world. This book revolves around three narratives: Aunt Lydia, who we know had a helping hand in stripping women of their sense of self and molded them to be controlled by the men of Gilead; Agnes, raised in Gilead with a Commander as father, privileged and set to marry well; and Daisy, a teenager raised in Canada hating Gilead and the abuses women endured that she’s learned about since she
Read more