2024 the best years of a life cast review

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The long-awaited new novel from Margaret Atwood. The Year of the Flood is a dystopic masterpiece and a testament to her visionary power. The times and species have been changing at a rapid rate, and the social compact is wearing as thin as environmental stability. Adam One, the kindly leader of the God's Gardeners - a religion devoted to the melding of science and religion, as well as the preservation of all plant and animal life - has long predicted a natural disaster that will alter Earth as we know it. Now it has occurred, obliterating most human life. Two women have survived: Ren, a young trapeze dancer locked inside the high-end sex club Scales and Tails, and Toby, a God's Gardener barricaded inside a luxurious spa where many of the treatments are edible.

Have others survived? Ren's bioartist friend Amanda? Zeb, her eco-fighter stepfather? Her onetime lover, Jimmy? Or the murderous Painballers, survivors of the mutual-elimination Painball prison? Not to mention the shadowy, corrupt policing force of the ruling powers...

Meanwhile, gene-spliced life forms are proliferating: The lion/lamb blends, the Mo'hair sheep with human hair, the pigs with human brain tissue. As Adam One and his intrepid hemp-clad band make their way through this strange new world, Ren and Toby will have to decide on their next move. They can't stay locked away...

By turns dark, tender, violent, thoughtful, and uneasily hilarious, The Year of the Flood is Atwood at her most brilliant and inventive.

Reviewer: L. Libro
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: A Post-Apocalyptic Glimpse of Human Grace
Review: If the world as we know it were to spin uncontrollably into an Orwellian or Huxleyian orbit, where the consumption of animals sped down a slippery slope of barbaric proportions and power-hungry corporations manufactured pharmaceuticals to purposely make us sick and bio-engineered organisms to nurture our vanity, then reality would come very close to Margaret Atwood's novel, The Year of the Flood. Some who cry conspiracy would say that that world has already come and its degradation upheld as evidenced in Atwood's fiction. I, on the other hand, compare Atwood to those other great authors, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, as a voice to be heeded not for imitating life, but rather warning us of what life might one day become.The world in The Year of the Flood has undergone an apocalyptic change, the "waterless flood". Told from the viewpoint of a survivor who recounts her experiences from before the flood, the novel is a portrayal not so much of the characters, who indeed vividly jump from the page, but of the society over which this flood must wash.With laser-like precision, the author's unique lens skillfully leads the reader through a dissection and analysis of our human collective. As painful as this sounds, when she portrays our materialism and animal consumerism in the extreme dimensions existing prior to the flood, how can we not see a clear comparison between fiction and our present day world? The CorpSeCorps is our government in bed with Helthwyzer, the pharmaceutical company. Happicuppa, the coffee company that laces us with "gen-mod" might very well be our Starbucks.In this world, life is perhaps how one might imagine man were he reach his lowest state, completely fallen into ultimate corruption through the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Technology and science has advanced to such a degree that we have full reign over biological creation and animals deserve no reverence. Humanity has reached the goal of supremacy over nature.I think it's safe to say that most humans wouldn't enjoy life in this Atwoodian world. Not only are animals subordinate, but most people are as well, unless of course you belong to the privileged class of scientists working for Helthwyzer or the government officials of the CorpSeCorps. Humans are at the mercy of each other's barbarianism. Your fellow man is most likely a rapist or thug and while atrocities may occasionally be apprehended, criminals are thrown into the "painball" wilderness where one is pitted against the other to the death for entertainment purposes, televised to the world.In this fictional world, you can pretty much expect there is no sanctuary...with the one clear exception of "the Gardeners". Though she has no religious leanings, the main character, Toby, finds herself living amongst this group and the main narrative is her telling of how she came to join them, her state of existence surviving through the waterless flood and her relationship to other characters in the story. Because Toby is very much like you or me she is the central viewing window through which we see the story.The Gardeners lend this Atwoodian society its only remaining thread of human dignity and cause for salvation. When orphaned Toby joins the Gardeners, it is because she has been rescued by them from an abusive employer, and though they come across as what we may view as a religious cult by our own standards, their principles, as illustrated throughout the novel in the form of well-written hymns and the teachings of their leaders known as Adams and Eves, fall nothing short of the highest ideals that could indeed save our world today.In preparation for the "waterless flood", the Gardeners' objective is to learn self-sustainability and harmony with nature. They teach horticulture and bee-keeping, survival skills, joyous life in the moment, sending "light" around those in need...all things that perhaps resonate with any reader who has ever thought that perhaps our world could use a little more of this.When the flood comes Toby has been separated from her gardeners clan. This is actually the starting point of the book with the timeline reaching back and then bringing the reader forward at about the midway point of the book. The waterless flood heralds the disbandment of the CorpSeCorps, Helthwyser and a total disintegration of any world order. Toby must survive alone and so the story of her life, post-flood, is intermixed with the telling of her story up to his point, the point from which she must learn to survive and we the reader discover the landscape of this world.Anyone who enjoys reading very rich, well-written thought-provoking literature will love The Year of the Flood. Margaret Atwood takes the human element of literary fiction to the brink of futuristic, urban sci-fi and creates a world deeply shadowed by the most despicable qualities of humanity, but manages to provide a glimpse of our potential for grace.I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Year of the Flood because I took away from it a reinforcement of that belief I carry in the fortitude of human grace. The Year of the Flood drew a crystal clear world for me, and a distinctive emotional and philosophical reaction from me, two feats that are not always so easy to find in real life. I found it engrossing, entertaining, thought-provoking and inspiring...all the things I most love in books. Therefore I give it the highest rating possible: 5 out of 5!I purchased Margaret Atwood's The Year of The Flood on my Kindle and the above review, as with all of my reviews, is completely honest and impartial.

Reviewer: Gabby M
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: A Strong Second Chapter
Review: I read the first book in this series (Oryx & Crake) nearly eight years ago, so it’s a good thing that this book is more a companion piece than a direct sequel. It returns to the same world and roughly the same time as O&C, but where that book explored that world through a man’s eyes, from inside the exclusive corporate bubbles, this one looks at it from the perspective of two women, who live out in the “real world”. Toby was raised in relative comfort, but circumstances derail her path and she finds herself working a low-wage retail job where she’s sexually abused by her boss. She escapes from his clutches with the help of the God’s Gardeners, a new religious movement focused on preserving what’s left of the natural world, and remains with the group first from a lack of anywhere else to go, and then from loyalty. One of the young people being raised within the group is Ren, whose mother brought her along when she left their cushy corporate home to run away with one of the group’s leaders, a man named Zeb. Though set in the time just after the plague has been unleashed on the world, the story is told largely through flashbacks, following both Toby’s and Ren’s lives with the Gardeners and what happens to them after they have separately left the group. I was, as ever, blown away with the power of Atwood’s imagination. So much of the way the world devolves feels heightened but not outside the realm of possibility, which makes it all the more haunting, and she develops the theology of the Gardeners with hymns and sermons from their leader, Adam One, in a way that feels realistic for something that would emerge in the context of the world she posits. After the maleness of O&C, the focus on Jimmy and Glenn (both of whom do show up in the narrative here in side roles), it’s refreshing to have Toby and Ren as narrators of The Year of the Flood, and the two women are both richly-drawn and compelling in their own ways. Atwood’s prose remains top-notch, I find her writing spellbinding in a way I find difficult to put my finger on but I get lost in so easily. There are some flaws here, most notably the way that several survivors manage to reconnect in a plague-decimated world in a way that defies probability, but the storytelling is too enjoyable otherwise to make that a fatal flaw.

Reviewer: Valerie M Schneider
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: I believe I will have to spend some time in a fallow state before I can assimilate and then understand, after which I will return to a responsive state.

Reviewer: Arunima & Subham's
Rating: 2.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Similar to her Oryx and Crake, Atwood’s The Year of the Flood takes place in the same (post)-apocalyptic scenario but is chronicled from a different perspective. But unlike its previous novel, it discourses heavily from the lens of environmentalism and care. The biblical allusions remain but they are densely packed and have been made to juxtapose with the evangelical mythos and are interpretated with an agenda of environmental concern arising from a biopolitical predicament. The entire novel deals with a general idea of care without a segregationist temperament and is somewhat written as a revision of the holy book similar to William Blake. However, Atwood hesitates to deal with the complexities of the situations she creates and shrinks from a deeper discourse on the human condition. Although her revisionist ideal sounds intriguing, the literature has been compromised.“All Creatures know that some must dieThat all the rest may take and eat;Sooner or later, all transformTheir blood to wine, their flesh to meat.But Man alone seeks Vengefulness,And writes his abstract Laws on stone;For this false Justice he has made,He tortures limb and crushes bone.Is this the image of a god?My tooth for yours, your eye for mine?Oh, if Revenge did move the starsInstead of Love, they would not shine.”^This was beautiful. 🙂

Reviewer: Amazon Customer
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: I really like this triology. This books takes quite a different perspective to the one in the first book. It explain many things that got unanswered in the first book.

Reviewer: Amazon_Customer6
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Se Margaret Atwood non esistesse, bisognerebbe inventarla, ma io non ho sarei capace.Questo romanzo, come il prosieguo della trilogia, come moltissimi altri suoi, è meraviglioso. C’è la capacità assoluta di costruire un mondo e di catapultarvi dentro il lettore senza spiegargli nulla eppure facendogli, a poco a poco, capire tutto, per quanto assurdo sia. È un libro quasi senza speranza, eppure si fa amare. La cura e la perfezione di stile e linguaggio costituiscono un piacere ad ogni pagina, per chi ama ascoltarli.Spero che la notorietà acquisita con la serie TV avvicini più persone a questa autrice.

Reviewer: Dolmup
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: The second volume of the Maddaddam trilogy is a fine illustration on human madness. Brilliantly pushed to its extreme by Margaret Atwood, our clever biotechnology could lead us the Waterless Flood.Political science fiction at its best. Thank you Margaret.