



Oryx and Crake
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4.3 • 217 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The first volume in the internationally acclaimed MaddAddam trilogy is at once an unforgettable love story and a compelling vision of the future—from the bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments
Snowman, known as Jimmy before mankind was overwhelmed by a plague, is struggling to survive in a world where he may be the last human, and mourning the loss of his best friend, Crake, and the beautiful and elusive Oryx whom they both loved. In search of answers, Snowman embarks on a journey—with the help of the green-eyed Children of Crake—through the lush wilderness that was so recently a great city, until powerful corporations took mankind on an uncontrolled genetic engineering ride. Margaret Atwood projects us into a near future that is both all too familiar and beyond our imagining.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Atwood has visited the future before, in her dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale. In her latest, the future is even bleaker. The triple whammy of runaway social inequality, genetic technology and catastrophic climate change, has finally culminated in some apocalyptic event. As Jimmy, apparently the last human being on earth, makes his way back to the RejoovenEsencecompound for supplies, the reader is transported backwards toward that cataclysmic event, its full dimensions gradually revealed. Jimmy grew up in a world split between corporate compounds (gated communities metastasized into city-states) and pleeblands (unsafe, populous and polluted urban centers). His best friend was "Crake," the name originally his handle in an interactive Net game, Extinctathon. Even Jimmy's mother-who ran off and joined an ecology guerrilla group when Jimmy was an adolescent-respected Crake, already a budding genius. The two friends first encountered Oryx on the Net; she was the eight-year-old star of a pedophilic film on a site called HottTotts. Oryx's story is a counterpoint to Jimmy and Crake's affluent adolescence. She was sold by her Southeast Asian parents, taken to the city and eventually made into a sex "pixie" in some distant country. Jimmy meets Oryx much later-after college, after Crake gets Jimmy a job with ReJoovenEsence. Crake is designing the Crakers-a new, multicolored placid race of human beings, smelling vaguely of citron. He's procured Oryx to be his personal assistant. She teaches the Crakers how to cope in the world and goes out on secret missions. The mystery on which this riveting, disturbing tale hinges is how Crake and Oryx and civilization vanished, and how Jimmy-who also calls himself "the Snowman," after that other rare, hunted specimen, the Abominable Snowman-survived. Chesterton once wrote of the "thousand romances that lie secreted in The Origin of Species." Atwood has extracted one of the most hair-raising of them, and one of the most brilliant.
Customer Reviews
Wonderful read
Loved this book. A little slow at first but then I really got into it about 1/3 through. Good science fiction novel. Scary. With modern-day prophetic possibilities!
A different angle.
I had to read this book for my english class summative. Before this book, I was never the type to go out of my way to read a book. I was very lazy to start reading it, but once I had only three days left until it was due, I couldn't help but feel guilty if I were to use spark-notes. The nights were hellish but it was so worth it.
Though slow at times, it was a perfectly good book until I got to the end. Immediately got the sequel. I was so glad that it wasn't another "romance" novel that just covered that part up with an interesting introduction.
My view on many things have changed from this book, and solidified my faith in some of my theories. Reading this was somewhat of a curse though, my career plan was going toward either sciences or arts. Oryx and Crake just lost my hope for being in the sciences. Though interesting, it looks pretty ugly for scientists.
An excellent story of a frighteningly possible future
Although I found a few chapters a bit dragging at approximately the one third mark, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. This is the first of Atwood's books I've read and I was not disappointed.
The characters, we're well established and although the central character, Jimmy/Snowman was not the type of person I would generally root for, I felt he was a product of his time and environment. I would have liked a bit more granularity in the history of Oryx. Her tragic childhood was well detailed but her later years, specifically how she was able to overcome the tragedy of her adolescence was entirely absent. I suppose the lack of information does give her a certain mystique.
I do enjoy an open ending, however the ending of this story did feel a touch too abrupt. Up next, The Year of the Flood.