Review: Oryx and Crake

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When this book came out it was highly recommended by several people I knew who read it and I have picked it up and read the jacket copy many times over the years, but I kept putting it back down. It was a mistake. This is a fabulous novel. The narrative twists and turns in a way that keeps you guessing about what exactly happened and giving you just enough information that you can't believe that what you think is coming could really be what will happen. (No, I'm not going to tell you what happens-- you need to read the the book.)
The world that Atwood creates is futuristic and bizarre, but like all dystopian fiction, just familiar enough to be alarming. There was a very weird juxtaposition between fact and fiction while I read this book. NHPR reported on hamburger grown in a lab from cow cells the same day I got to the part of the novel that describes "ChickiNobs": "What they were looking at was a large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes and at the  end of each tube another bulb was growing. ... Those are chickens, chicken parts. Just the breasts, on this one. They've got ones that specialises in drumsticks too, twelve to a growth unit." Way too weird (also yuck).

This is my first book for the 7th Annual Canadian Book Challenge.