Defined By Books

The Year of the Flood - Margaret Atwood

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood is her most recent, brilliant novel. Ms. Atwood continues the journey she began with Oryx and Crake by giving us an alternative view of the events that took place that we learn is referred to as the "Waterless Flood" by a cult called God's Gardeners.

We are introduced to two survivors of the plague, Toby and Ren. Toby is living her days after the Flood in a popular spa called AnooYoo. After having to go into hiding and losing her identity when she was young, Toby is rescued at a fast food joint in the pleebands (areas of the city) called SecretBurgers by the Gardeners. She has been a victim of sexual abuse by the manager, Blanco the Bloat, by whose own proclamation he never lets a woman live. Toby joins the Gardeners with their strange rooftop gardens, basement mushroom growing and refusal to eat any sort of animal product with a face. They are a back-to-nature cult who teach their followers about God's love of animals and humans and their respect to their surroundings. Toby begins teaching an herb class and eventually becomes the bee keeper. However, Blanco's obsession with finding Toby never wains, bringing terror to the Gardeners. Toby gets an identity change, complete with new hair and plastic surgery and begins managing the AnooYoo Spa until the plague begins to spread quickly across the world. Per the Gardener's teaching of the "Waterless Flood" that God has planned for them, she has a storage of food and supplies hidden away that she lives upon after sending all the Spa girls to their families and locking herself inside.

Ren is a trapeze dancer at the local sex joint, Scales and Tails. Her BioFilm suit that she wears while "performing" is torn and she is locked into an isolation room, escaping the terror of the plague. She spent her earlier life among the Gardeners, when her mother brought her there.  She left in her early teen years, when her mother went back to her father in the Compound. Through a series of unfortunate events, she ends up at Scales and Tails as a high end prostitute and truly enjoys her job.

The story follows Ren and Toby's narrative, painting a brilliant picture of their pasts and how it lead up to their present situations. I believe the most intriguing part of this novel is where the overlapping of characters occur. Jimmy and Glenn, from Oryx and Crake, appear repeatedly in the novel, cleverly entwined with our current characters and others from their past, whom we wonder if they are alive or dead.

Ms. Atwood introduced us to many new concepts in Oryx and Crake that she refers to as "speculative fiction" versus science fiction. The world is full of genetically engineered animals, foods and diseases. Everything is based off of the scientific progressions occuring within the Compounds with the pharmaceutical companies. In Oryx and Crake, Ms. Atwood introduces to the scientific side of the plague. In The Year of the Flood, she introduces us to the more human side. 

I can't write much about this novel without giving anything away, not that it's a great secret! Read Oryx and Crake to get a little background and understand what the words "liobams", "pleeblands" and "Crakers" actually mean. Read Oryx and Crake to wonder what the world would be like if we were completely wiped out by a plague and there were few human survivors, if any Then read The Year of the Flood and figure out what could happen next if there were survivors of the plague.

Vanishing Acts - Jodi Picoult

Vanishing Acts contains Jodi Picoult's typical complex, yet tearjerking formula. The main character, Delia, has a child out of wed-lock, with her fiance, Eric, who is both the love of her life and her best friend. Her best friend, Fitz, is also Eric's best friend, all three growing up directly next to each other. Delia's father, Andrew, works with the local senior citizen center in their small New Hampshire town. He has not only raised Delia since her mother passed away when she was four, but also became a father figure for her two, inseparable friends. Shortly into the novel, we find out that Eric's mother was an alcoholic, which he too suffers from. Fitz is a genius with words and works for a small, local newspaper and he's thoroughly head over heels in love with Delia, even though he knows her heart belongs to Eric.

After a string of strange recollections that seem more like dreams than memories, Delia recalls them to Fitz, who takes it upon himself to look into it with his journalistic ties. One thing leads to another and suddenly, Delia is standing at her front door letting the police in, who arrest her father in front of Sophie, her daughter. He is charged with kidnapping Delia at the age of four and fleeing from Arizona with her to live in New Hampshire. Eric becomes, more by association than anything, Andrew's attorney.

The novel touches upon alcoholism, child molestation, kidnapping, and a plethora of other moral actions that adults make while dealing with themselves and children. As I stated above, Ms. Picoult uses her usual suspects in this novel: an attorney suffering from some sort of underlying issue (Eric's alcoholism), a parent having to make a life-changing decision for their child that will affect the way that child grows up (Andrew taking Delia away from her alcoholic and therefore, neglectful, mother) and a close friend having to deal with their own moral decision. Just to give the dish a little flavor, she throws in child molestation, a neighborly friend with her nose stuck in the family's business who also happens to introduce them a little Hopi tradition and a long-lost mother who delves into old Mexican witchery.

I'm sure that each one of us has known, or know now, of someone who is an alcoholic, current or recovering. Unfortunately, it's one of those diseases that more people know about than should. By writing about a subject that many of us can relate, Ms. Picoult can make us more sympathetic to her plot, or rather, to Andrew's plot.

I enjoyed this novel, as I do most of Picoult's novels. I guess I need to take a short break from her novels as I know her formula so well, I can nearly guess what will happen in the end. Too much of a good thing? For now anyway...

Handle With Care - Jodi Picoult

Jodi Picoult's latest tearjerker, Handle With Care, lives up to the Picoult tearjerker theme in every way. She includes the usual personal ethics and morality theme with medical aspects. This time, she chose the subject of osteogenesis imperfecta. In laymen terms, it's brittle bone syndrome, which means that people who suffer from this disease can do very little and break tons of bones.

Willow is born with osteogenesis imperfecta. By the time we meet her in the novel, she is 5 years old and has already broken some many bones that her mother, Charlotte, has lost track of the exact number, although always recalling where and the pain she felt with each break. Charlotte and her husband Sean are beginning to see how having a child with such a complicated disability affects them financially and as a family. When Sean seeks an attorney after another incident at Disney World involving Willow and multiple breaks, their relationship begins to break apart along with their family. The attorney offers Charlotte a way to get out of her family's bleak financial future by claiming a wrongful birth suit against her ob/gyn, who also happens to be her best friend. Finally, to add misery to even more misery, Charlotte's older daughter, Amelia, begins to have her own problems dealing with bulimia caused by her own self hatred.

When I can't decide what I want to read, I check out a Jodi Picoult book. I can guarantee a few things when I finish one of her books: 1) I will feel much better about my life and whatever negative situations I am dealing with and 2) I will cry and thus, probably just feel better in general. I also know that I will read an "impossible to put down" book and that I will thoroughly enjoy it, even though I will probably be morally against the end decision. She often deals with children, rare diseases and crazy law suits that have to do with those children. Parents often make absurb decisions in Picoult's book but when I think about it and whether I would make that same decision, I sometimes stall. Would I be able to do the same thing?

I am always intrigued by Ms. Picoult's novels. She pulls together a number of provocative issues and makes one question our own morality. I will say that this particular novel of hers did not make me cry. I thoroughly enjoyed the book until the end. I felt it was contrived and Ms. Picoult just wanted the reader to react to her rash decision without any thought to how well we paid attention to the novel. Willow is so much smarter than Ms. Picoult makes her out to be in the end, she would never have acted the way she did after all she had been through. I also felt the same about Charlotte's character. Would a mother who claimed that she loved her daughter that much do what she did and believe that her daughter would truly recover emotionally?

So, if you want a tearjerker, read a Jodi Picoult novel. Just don't read this one...read The Pact or even better, the original and more believable tearjerker, My Sister's Keeper.

Surfacing - Margaret Atwood

Surfacing follows a young woman's journey back to her childhood home in Canada to discover what became of her missing father. She makes her journey with her lover, Joe, and a married couple whom she considers "friends" even though she has only known them for two months. They have a car and are, therefore, her ride back to her secluded village. She grew up on an island many miles away from the village without electricity or running water, which intrigues her city friends.

We learn quickly that she doesn't want to see her missing father, but to only make sure that he is safe. Through her inner monologue, we also learn that her mother has already passed away some time before and that she herself was married but is no longer, hence why she hasn't visited her childhood home.

I'm done with that narrative only because it's so much more complicated than that. For such a short novel, it's incredibly full of unfinished thoughts and convoluted memories. We are initially led to believe that the narrator married young and had a baby, which she says was never her own but was always "his." Then, the subsequent divorce, which we are also told led to her estrangement from her parents. However, as the story moves forward, she (has no name) discovers that she has been supressing the truth within her own mind. Instead, she had an affair with a married professor at her art school and got pregnant. He, in turn, "helped" her get an abortion, claiming it was the only way. Broken-hearted and broken-minded, she creates a false story in her mind and begins to believe it.

At this point in the novel, our narrator begins to go crazy and that's where Ms. Atwood lost me. The narrator tells the reader that basically she is metamorphosing into some other being, an animal, with fur and no longer understands language. Of course, this also stems back to her secluded childhood growing up in a French speaking community where her parents spoke only English - an obvious barrier for her language skills to develop as she developed into an adult. Our narrator becomes a crazed animal trying to become one with her surroundings, refusing to have anything to do with man-made items of any sort. Finally, she begins to come back to her senses and grow back into her own skin, so to speak.

I have enjoyed many Margaret Atwood novels. She also creates an intriguing plot and narrative. She rarely repeats herself on the subject matter directly, although she may revisit science fiction, feminism, etc. as a whole throughout her novels. I never know what to expect from her and that makes me enjoy her work. When I read Oryx and Crake for the first time, I didn't really like it. The second time I read it, I loved it. I enjoyed The Handmaid's Tale the first time around. This time, I'm going to have to admit that I doubt that I will read this novel again.

I disliked all of the characters who accompanied our narrator on her trip. No wonder she went crazy! They used sex as a manipulative tool, spoke of those "Yanks" (they were Canadian) in an aggressive, yet uneducated way (obviously, keeping up with the times of the novel). They were loud-mouthed and stupid and rarely acted in a way that made them likable. Sometimes, I caught myself feeling sorry for Joe, the narrator's lover. He was able to show emotion but to me, he was much like a grown man with teenage angst emotions instead of matured emotions.

Then of course there is the narrator herself and her repression of her early young adult trauma, i.e. abortion. She tells us that "he" claimed it was legal. I understand her repression of the truth and her inevitable break down when she realized what really did happen. What I don't understand is her belief of the story she made up in place of the truth. I can understand completely forgetting what happened, but fabricating a lie in her mind that she based her entire existence on shows that she was emotionally unstable long before she ever left the island to begin her grown up life. I just don't find her a believable character, unless of course she's a mental patient...which she may very well be after her incredulous metamorphis.

Sorry Ms. Atwood. Your second published novel leaves me feeling empty and not quite right inside. Maybe that's what you wanted?