By JK, on November 2nd, 2009 I started reading the much-anticipated The Year of the Flood before the Giller shortlist was announced and the blogs and papers started buzzing in shock at this grand dame’s exclusion from our most lucrative literary award. But after completing the book, I can understand why this venerable Canadian scribe was left out in the cold.
I’m not saying it’s a bad book. Atwood has earned her reputation, and the prose is riddled with the usual dark humor, clever wordplay and striking imagery (a few pages in she compares the unruly bushes to frayed hairbrushes — perfect). The characters are fully realized, and I delighted in Ren, though admittedly, Toby was a little drab. I found reading the book over two days on the thanksgiving weekend easier than digesting dinner, and perhaps that’s the problem.
But first, a small synopsis: YOTF takes us back to the world presented in Oryx & Crake, where the majority of the population has been wiped out by a virus, and only a smattering of humans remain. YOTF focuses on two of these humans, Ren, a young sex worker, and Toby, an active member of a religious sect, the God’s Gardener’s. Ren and Toby’s stories have two threads: [...]
By JK, on July 27th, 2009 It’s important to start by saying that I’m not a Stephenie Meyer hater, in fact, I found myself pretty caught up in the Twilight saga (reviews here and here). I’m not making felt replicas of Bella’s womb or anything, but I found that after a while I entered the Twilight haze deep enough to gloss over the bad writing.
I wish I could say the same for Meyer’s “adult” stand-alone title, The Host. Set on earth in the not-so-distant future, human bodies have been colonized by lifeforms from another universe ,”Souls.” A few humans as we know them remain, however, they are actively hunted down as a danger to the bland pacifism that the souls cultivate on earth. The novel starts with the implantation of an old soul (“Wanderer” or later, Wanda) in the body of a young resistance fighter, Melanie. But rather than fading into the background, Melanie remains and maintains an active role in Wanderer’s mind. Her influence is so powerful that her memories and dreams make Wanderer fall in love with Melanie’s fiery-yet-chaste boyfriend, Jared, and come to love her younger brother, Jamie (both still human). So Wanderer sets out to find them, and ends up a member [...]
By Anna Moorhouse, on March 16th, 2009 I admit that I’m a sucker for a great cover design and a catchy title, which is why I initially picked up a copy of this YA sci-fi novel (the first in an ever-expanding series).
The novel follows a 16-year-old ‘Ugly’ named Tally Youngblood, so-called because she has not yet undergone the all-but-mandatory cosmetic surgery that would make her a ‘Pretty’. The Pretties all live across the bridge in a very Brave-New-World environment of care-free hedonism, whose sinister underbelly is inevitably revealed about half-way through the book. (Excerpt from the first chapter below):
Tally crept along the river until she reached a pleasure garden, and slipped into the darkness beneath a row of weeping willows. Under their cover she made her way alongside a path lit by little guttering flames.
A pretty couple wandered down the path. Tally froze, but they were clueless, too busy staring into each other’s eyes to see her crouching in the darkness. Tally silently watched them pass, getting that warm feeling she always got from looking at a pretty face. Even when she and Peris used to spy on them from the shadows, giggling at all the stupid things the pretties said and did, they couldn’t resist staring. [...]
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