Reviews

For a book published in 2003, Oryx and Crake does a spectacular job of holding up. Every theme in this novel is still prevalent in our current society - if not arguably more so than when originally written.
My one issue is that Jimmy/Snowman is rather unlikeable. I recognise this was the point, but it did get annoying watching him make continuously dumb decisions and have absolutely zero self-preservation skills yet somehow be the ‘only’ person left alive (the amount of times i wrote “why…” or “he’s so dumb” in my book was insane).
I absolutely loved the character of Jimmy’s mother — so many connection to Eyal Press’ “Dirty Jobs” (for the 0.0001% of people reading this who have read both books)! Plus, my psychology major heart loved trying to understand the various mindsets of the characters here. Crake is a serious case study.
Wish there had been more development of how everything in the apocalypse went down near the end (trying to keep this spoiler-free, but let’s just say there could’ve been more on how Crake did… you know. everything). Then again, I couldn’t flip the last hundred or so pages fast enough, so.
All that to say, I really loved this book. Many stars and underlines and “WTF” can be found in my copy lol!

sarahetc's review against another edition

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4.0

This book gets five stars because it is technically masterful. Atwood is a surgeon of words and rarely is a single word not deeply meaningful. Further, she switches timelines and points of view with such subtlety that it's barely noticeable, yet the flow of the narrative is active and consistent, full of both reflection and foreshadowing.

This book gets four stars because as a world builder, Atwood is sort of winging it on a cocktail napkin. It comes across as all there in her head; she clearly wants to meet the reader halfway. But she's not great at giving directions. I get that it's a post-apocalyptic dystopia, but some of the pieces of her puzzle of climate change, chimerized, supervirus horror show didn't match up. You could ignore if you tried, but the mishmash is still there, in your peripheral vision.

This book gets three stars because she takes the natural human need to be sympathetic towards our fellow humans and subverts it, then defecates on it, then slits its throat and leaves it for dead in an airlock.

This book gets two stars because did I mention chimeras? Human ones? Shudder.

This book gets one star for fronting like a stand-alone story, then ending in media res and leaving everyone to wait six years to see if anything else happened. Shenanigans!

This book gets all the stars. I like it. And I will definitely read the rest of the trilogy. But I'll brace myself for the roller coaster that I now know it will be. I should probably give it five stars for technical mastery, but I don't know that I would personally recommend it on a wide scale. So four stars with that caveat. Wow.