TL;DR
Overall rating: 4/5
Genre: Science fiction (dystopian); adventure & survival
Length: 376 pages
One-sentence summary: In a world destroyed by a mysterious disaster, a man tries to both survive and protect a new breed of humans.
Tough topics: Scenes of abuse, rape, and sexual trafficking are not graphic, but are present.
Read-alikes: Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler; Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel; Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro
Available formats: Print (in the library) & electronic (via the Sora app or SoraApp.com)
Oryx & Crake, by much-awarded author Margaret Atwood, is a sort of updated version of Frankenstein in which a scientist who thinks very highly of himself tries to play God and fails miserably. Or does he? I'm not sure if the scientist in question should be considered a hero or a villain, but I am sure that the story was riveting. I very much wanted to know what happened next!
Some elements of the novel that will either really excite you or really turn you off:
It's by the same author who wrote The Handmaid's Tale, which you may be familiar with because of the streaming TV show that's based on it. The stories are not exactly the same, but if you've read or watched Handmaid, then you have some idea of the vibe of Oryx & Crake.
It's dystopian science fiction--it takes place in a society in which science and technology have resulted in its cataclysmic decline. Highly educated people with scientific minds live in bucolic (and highly regulated) walled compounds sponsored by corporations that make products like ChickieNobs, chickens without brains that are made entirely of breast meat. Regular people live in the "Pleeblands," poor and crime-infested neighborhoods of increasingly dangerous and derelict American cities. Art, music, literature, and other elements of culture have been replaced by a worldwide web which offers only violent cartoons and pornography. If you like Ender's Game, Ready Player One, or any of Scott Westerfeld's books, you're probably going to get into Oryx & Crake, too.
The characters are all kind of awful. Some are products of their circumstances--the woman, Oryx, was trafficked from Southeast Asia as a child and grew up locked in an American garage--and some, like the scientist Crake, are just yuck. These characters are intriguing, and sometimes even likeable, but you aren't going to find any heroes in this book.
The story jumps back and forth between two timelines: pre-apocalypse and post-apocalypse. I didn't find it difficult to keep track of what timeline I was in while reading, but the story isn't completely linear and that bothers some readers.
The mystery of the book--what caused the apocalypse in which the main character presently lives--is revealed very slowly. I liked this, because it gave the book the air of a mystery novel. If you don't like to figure out "whodunnit"--or, in this case, what they did--then you might be frustrated by Oryx and Crake.
It's a thinking book. You can kind of sort of just enjoy it as adventure sci-fi, but at its heart it's extremely philosophical, like any good dystopian novel. If you want a fluffy, relaxing book, this one probably isn't it.
Oryx and Crake is the first book in the three-book MaddAddam series. You don't have to read all three books, obviously, but they are there if you're someone who likes to dive deep into fictional worlds.
I probably won't read the whole series right away, but I enjoyed (Is that the right word to use when reading about the apocalypse?) Oryx & Crake enough to put the other books on my to-be-read-in-the-distant-future list. Drop by the library today if it sounds like something you might be interested in, too!
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