The Year of the Flood

This is the sequel to Oryx and Crake and I really enjoyed it, in fact I preferred it . I think that is simply because Margaret Atwood is just a far better writer when she is narrating from a woman's perspective.  Plus this book just had a meatier story line. (Metaphorically speaking as there isn't any meat we would recognise left in this futuristic world, apart from human.)
 What I love most about Atwood's futuristic world is that she takes advances in science, which we all recognise as normal,  and takes the progress to the nth degree. Ultimately this ends in the most nightmarish conclusions where all control and ethics have vanished.
This book happens concurrently to the action retold in Oryx and Crake just before the 'Flood' which kills off all humanity. This book has more colour though as you see how life is in the  pleeblands which are the ghetto areas where most of the people live if you don't work for a multi-national company.
  Society has disintegrated to the lowest denominator and Margaret's outlook is extremely bleak as mob rule takes over the world in graphically violent imagery.
 Amongst all this carnage there are God's Gardeners, a cult created around the sanctity and beauty of the Earth who try to keep old traditions alive. The two female protagonists come from this cult and their knowledge and forethought enables them both to survive through the 'Flood'   This cult is totally believable but all of the sermons at the beginning of each chapter did bore me a bit, maybe because I'm not such a big ecological or environmental warrior as Atwood. For me Atwood has enough grit and realism in this book  just to stop short of it being a preachy tome being thrown at my head!
I loved how people survived through these hard years before the 'flood' and also how characters from Oryx and Crake appeared in this novel .  The endings of the two novels end up at exactly the same point with charaters and plots interweaving. Very Clever!
 Now I have to wait for her to release the third book, what the hell is going to happen?!
I love Margaret Atwood because she takes risks in her writing.  She is so passionate, writes beautifully and even though she is sometimes annoying her stories keep you hooked.