I mentioned to a friend (who also consumes books like I do) that I was reading Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood. Friend says, “it must be depressing. I can’t read her stuff.” I noted that although I did like Atwood’s writing, it had been 19 years since I read Handmaid’s Tale, and that 19 years was a good amount of time to recover from such stories. I had read Cat’s Eye 4 years before that so I did need some space to recover from the writing back then too.
The Year of the Flood describes a world where genetic engineering has so corrupted life that a man-made virus has wiped out most of the population. The narrative describes the back stories of our two heroines Ren and Toby, how they survived the “waterless flood” and how they cope with the post-flood world.
The characters are well developed and the story is compelling. I was listening to this (14 hours) so I didn’t know where it would end. That’s a weird thing about audiobooks, you don’t know how close you are to the end of the book! I’m not sure I’ll need a 19 year break before I read another Atwood book.
