Some questions are best left unanswered, and some endings are better off unwritten because sometimes the question itself is what makes the piece so extraordinary. Revealing what happens next could only ever be disappointing. This felt like a massive overwrite. Atwood is only joining the dots here, piecing together the threads of storytelling and character arcs left open from the previous two instalments (that were only ever vaguely related to each other.) It’s like a forced conclusion as it’s al...

I have completion anxiety, or whatever it's called. If it's a trilogy of books we are talking about, YES, it WILL take me YEARS to complete. Thankfully, Maddaddam book three immediately reminds you of why you fell in love with Atwood's postapocalyptic world in the first place.It has parts of "Oryx and Crake" & "Year of the Flood" in it... the former a sprawling genesis of the apocalypse, the latter a more personal tale of what it takes to survive it. Maddaddam contains a mixture of both (there i...

I was so excited about this last book of the MaddAddam trilogy and I saw the book in Waterstones couple of weeks in hardcover. I could not resist.... and read!I read the reviews and saw that some readers were somewhat disappointed about this final MaddAddam. I really don't care.... I am amazed still by the content, imagination and cleverness of this story and this great writer. Yes the first book was amazing, mindboggling, what's happening here... the second book shocking and up close & personal...

Ok, MaddAddam! Let me say straight away that I don't like sequels that much. But then again, I didn't like dystopian fiction at all before I read "Oryx and Crake" some 10 years ago. After "The Year of the Flood" came out 4 years ago, I found myself unable to wait for the paperback version, and I didn't even consider waiting when "MaddAddam" was announced.I don't know what I expected and I think I should probably re-read the first two books to grasp all ideas in MaddAddam, but my instant feeling...

“People need such stories, because however dark, a darkness with voices in it is better than a silent void.” After enjoying the first two books in the series so well (Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood), I had some apprehension about Margaret Atwood's final book in the series, MaddAddam. This book takes up where both of the first two books end, and follows what is ostensibly the last remnant of humanity as we had known it (along with the genetically engineered humanoids known as Crakers)....

I delighted in this “Back to the Future” visit to the post-apocalyptic world populated a few human survivors of a man-made plague. In essence, the first in the series, “Oryx and Crake”, focused on the motive and method by which Crake caused the plague and led the creation of a genetically modified form of human, who like bonobos are dedicated to making love not war and can live by grazing kudzu. “The Year of the Flood” focused on the aftermath of the plague and the survival efforts of an eco-cul...

Why?I read this because I enjoy Atwood's varied writing, I like reading dystopian and speculative fiction, and the the preceding two books in this trilogy were excellent, in different ways.#1 Oryx and Crake reviewed here 4*: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...#2 Year of the Flood reviewed here 4*: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...#3 MaddAddam only 2*. I read each within a year or so of publication and didn't know it was planned as a trilogy until I finished the second. The first work...

I seem to be in the minority here, but I...very much did not love this. I mean, a disappointing Margaret Atwood book is still better than most other things published, but this was not at all the conclusion to the series I was hoping for.(view spoiler)[I just can't wrap my head around why she chose to go in this direction. Nothing really happened in this book, and the nothing all led up to a conclusion that seemed totally pointless, especially in the grand scheme of things. Arguably, nothing real...

Oh my. Ouch. I’m not quite sure what my biggest disappointment is about this book. Is it that brave, bad-ass, bitchin’ Toby becomes sleeping-with-Zeb Toby, who does nothing except whine, pine, and be jealous of every single women who has ever been in proximity to Zeb through the course of his life? Is it the maddening, contraction-less Craker stories, a clumsy plot device that culminates in the obtuse cultivation of an Oh-Fuck myth? Is it that the relationship between Adam & Zeb breaks little ne...

before reading: May I tell you about my borderline-psychotic quest to score an advance proof of this book?It involved contacting literally every single person on GR who had reviewed this pre-publication, in order to prostrate myself and beg them to loan me their copy. Of those who dignified my crazy request with a response, a few had been given advance editions on the promise of never sharing them, and the rest had read it in e-galleys, which fuck that. And anyway, those like disappear as soon a...

I wish I hadn't been so disappointed in this book. Why was I so disappointed in this book? I finished it Saturday night and haven't really been able to gather the brain power to assign any words to this. Yesterday I read though some of the reviews and found many of the things that bothered me articulated much more clearly by other reviewers here:Badass Toby became lovesick high school girl Toby, whose entire identity seems to grow from her love interest. WTF feminist writer Margaret Atwood?Jimmy...

This last chapter is yet another astounding book in the MaddAddam trilogy, as we get the end of the world from Zeb's point of view and what happens with the survivors. So sad to be leaving this utterly amazing constructed reality. Atwood created a world of unfettered and completely deregulated capitalism, science and corporatism to create a nightmare world that felt only a few decades from some of the low points of the 20th century! 9 out of 12.

This is the story of a book. The book is called MaddAddam.The book completes the story (in three books) of the making of the Great Emptiness in the world that we two-skins (clothes being our second skin) live in, the world of the twenty-first century. And how this world developed in the decades ahead of where we are now. (I have warned you that we are called two-skins in the story, at least by the new inhabitants of earth, but I will just call us people sometimes.)That story of the world develop...

"There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too."Preach, Mother Atwood. This past week has had me reimmersed into the MaddAddam trilogy, starting with a fifth re-read of Oryx and Crake since we discussed it for an SFF Audio podcast. (That was a great discussion, by the way. It answered some questions that I've had for years. Years!)When you read all the books of

I'm glad I finished Atwood's dystopian adventure trilogy, but this final volume was easily the weakest of the three books. It concerns the pandemic survivors of Books One (Oryx And Crake) and Two (The Year Of The Flood): most importantly, Jimmy (Snowman), Toby, Ren, Amanda, Zeb and the beautiful naked Children of Crake (or Crakers), a new race genetically engineered by Jimmy's brilliant childhood friend Glenn (a.k.a. Crake). In addition to packs of dangerous animal hybrids, there are also two ve...