What do readers think of The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood? Write your own review.

I jumped at the chance to preview a book by an author of Margaret Atwood's stature. The Year of the Flood is my first Atwood reading and I'm new to the futuristic genre. It takes a while to get into the flow of the time periods, but narration by Toby and Ren is an effective style to develop the characters and the plot. By the end of the novel, I began to care more about them.

Atwood's scene descriptions are vividly picturesque and coupled with the The God's Gardeners Oral Hymnbook have great cinematic possibilities. I found the futuristic vocabulary more trite than humorous and didn't feel my mind had been expanded into future shock. My conclusion: Ms Atwood lives up to my expectations as a writer but I'd like a more intriguing plot.

The Year of the Flood is a futuristic, apocalyptic story with a set of fairly interesting characters. It is a companion novel to Atwood's Oryx and Crake, in that it shares the setting and some of the characters of this earlier novel. While I found Oryx and Crake to be a fascinating and rewarding read, The Year of the Flood was a little harder to get engaged with, and ultimately left me with less of a sense of awe at the author's tremendous imagination. I call it a small disappointment because I hold such high hopes for any novel by this author, but it is a worthwhile book.

Margaret Atwood has given us both a terrifying and fascinating look at a possible future, one that seems more realistic than the many others that have been written. I could not put it down and the characters are especially endearing.

The Year of the Flood is an interesting look at what would happen if there was a Flood that did not involve water and yet wiped out most of the people on earth. It looks at a variety of issues that would affect the future earth including bioengineering of plants and animals. It is an excellent portrayal of what might be. Science fiction fans will love the future world that is presented. The difficulty is that being able to picture in your mind the genetically spliced animals can become a problem with the way the reader “sees” what he or she is reading. This would be a great movie.

The Year of the Flood may not be for everyone. It definitely falls into the category of dystopian future lit. But thanks to Margaret Atwood's visionary powers, clever use of words, and inventive plot, the book soars above other books of this nature. The interspersed themes are important ones: a global pandemic, the delicate nature of our ecosystem, the imaginary proliferation of gene-spliced life forms, the melding of science and religion, the nature of survival. And ultimately, Atwood leaves the reader with a glimpse of hope. Recommended!

I started The Year of the Flood with high expectations, a little too high. While I will say it is certainly a very unique book I personally found it hard to like the characters. I did enjoy Ms Atwood's ability to create fictional "blended" animals and there were times I had to look words up just to verify that some things mentioned did not, in fact, exist is this world. The futuristic world was well described - though not one I would ever wish to occupy!

Ms. Atwood has a beautiful way with words and lots of little "gems" of wisdom within the book. (example: Hunger is a powerful reorganizer of the conscience. Another is "hunger is the best sauce". Possibly my favorite "What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question". But for me it was a struggle for me to finish this book (looking at some of my popular suspense novels sitting on my shelf didn't help!) I would only recommend this book to very a select readership.

There is no doubt that this a sobering apocalyptic view of some unknown future time, but I think the title was a bit of a misnomer. There is way more than a year covered here and it took me a long time to get into the swing of the story. Both of our main characters, Toby and Ren are telling their tales back and forth throughout twenty-five years of dystopian life with the evil corporation, gene-mutating scientists and a ravaged environment all present. Although Atwood certainly worked hard--there are Adam One's sermons and hymns from the Gardener's Oral Hymnbook reproduced for us, it just wasn't the home run I was hoping for. Try The Handmaid's Tale for a better cautionary view of the future.

This book has good character development, but I kept waiting for the story to get going, and then it ended. I would of liked more of the "current year", even if it meant a longer book. I felt like she wrapped things up too early and too neatly.