The MaddAddam Triolgy, by My Favorite Mad Eve

Margaret Atwood has got to be one of the greatest women Canada has ever produced (insert your choice of Canada jokes here, but I'm being totally sincere). She's just so damn smart. I felt that way when I wrote my thesis on her most popular novel, The Handmaid's Tale and last year when I read and reviewed Alias Grace. I felt that way when I was blessed to see her in person. And after finishing this trilogy it is one of many takeaways that I will try to briefly summarize here for you. Being only a fraction as intelligent I strongly recommend you read her work for yourself.

(#1) Read 26 Books
1. Firestarter by Stephen King
2.World War Z by Max Brooks
3. Where Men Win Glory by Jon Krakauer
4. Red Hook Road by Ayelet Waldman
5. A Wolf at the Table by Augusten Burroughs
6. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
7. Open House by Elizabeth Berg
8. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
9. The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman
10. The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman
11. White Noise by Don DeLillo
12. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
13. The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
14. MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood

I read Oryx and Crake in college in a class called "Apocalyptic Fiction" (yes, it was awesome). I didn't realize it was a trilogy until MaddAddam came out this year, so I had to read it again as a refresher.

It follows the story of "Snowman" (pre-apocalyptic name: Jimmy) coping as one of the last surviving humans in what seems to be the end of days. Jimmy's only companions are his charges, the "Children of Crake;" they are a new species created by his departed friend Crake and intended to replace humans who have destroyed the Earth.

I loved Oryx and Crake. It easily stands alone as its own novel and is probably the best of the three. It is both quiet and introspective, yet with bouts of explosive world-shattering excitement. Despite having read many books in this genre it showed me something I have never seen and made me ask questions I have never asked myself (such as: Do humans really deserve to live on this planet?)

The Year of the Flood is the second novel in the series by takes place at approximately parallel times to Oryx and Crake.  It details the rise of the "God's Gardner's," a fringe cult that is essentially trying to save the Earth from all the ways the humans are destroying it. It was a bit slower than Oryx and Crake and was literally and figuratively "preachy"-- Atwood often uses the cult leaders to espouse her own not-so-hidden agenda. What I liked about it was that it gave me a fuller picture of what happened in the world before, during and after the apocalyptic event.

Finally in MaddAddam we rejoin our friend Jimmy, aka Snowman, aka Snowman-the-Jimmy. I became quite attached to Jimmy and I was happy with how this installment treated him. However, I have to say I was expecting more of a grand "answer" after all the buildup in the first two novels. It was a lovely wrap-up but it didn't have the profound impact that the other two novels did.

Atwood darkly calls her work not science fiction, but "speculative fiction," and she is often much too accurate. The world of this trilogy is wrought with dramatically deadly weather, food that is created solely in labs, and economics reminiscent of the Middle Ages. I don't claim to know anything about, say, bioengineering, but she presents the events in the novel in such a way that they seem not only plausible but probable.

Perhaps you don't want to ask yourself whether the world would be better off without humans. But if you can stomach the thought, you'd probably enjoy this trilogy.