Summary from GoodReads:

The narrator of Atwood’s riveting novel calls himself Snowman. When the story opens, he is sleeping in a tree, wearing an old bedsheet, mourning the loss of his beloved Oryx and his best friend Crake, and slowly starving to death. He searches for supplies in a wasteland where insects proliferate and pigoons and wolvogs ravage the pleeblands, where ordinary people once lived, and the Compounds that sheltered the extraordinary. As he tries to piece together what has taken place, the narrative shifts to decades earlier. How did everything fall apart so quickly? Why is he left with nothing but his haunting memories? Alone except for the green-eyed Children of Crake, who think of him as a kind of monster, he explores the answers to these questions in the double journey he takes – into his own past, and back to Crake’s high-tech bubble-dome, where the Paradice Project unfolded and the world came to grief.

My Review:

In The Robber Bride, I experienced Margaret Atwood’s brilliant character-writing.  In The Handmaid’s Tale, I learned just how chilling a dystopian, apocalyptic book can be.   With Oryx and Crake I saw both of those aspects of Atwood’s writing combined in the forms of Snowman(Jimmy), Oryx, and Crake.

As with all books of this type, it takes a little adjusting and getting used to – the world is foreign, and its unfamiliarity can make for some rough reading, but Atwood does a beautiful job of introducing some beings that were so simple it was difficult not to like them, to be curious about them.  It was that curiosity that had me digging deeper into the story, savoring every answer I received and pushing until, finally, the answers were all laid before me.  And then – no, that wasn’t all.  There were still questions left unanswered and now I know why I was told to wait to read The Year of the Flood (which I’ve already requested).

The summary does a good job of letting you, the reader, know what this book is about, and I don’t want to get into it because, frankly, it’s a bit complex to do it easily without revealing some pretty major plot points.  I will say, however, that this is a “meat and potatoes” read.  It’s not a fluff book you can easily pick up and then just as easily put down.  It takes some dedication but it’s so rewarding and worth it.

Check out these review(s):

Reading with Tequila

Chrisbookarama