Ending with Atwood

Hello all. As this is my first post, I’m going to set down my rules for my reviews.  If a book is wonderful, engaging, and sucks my face into its pages until I finish reading, it will receive a pen.  Any single book can earn up to five pens, noting the levels of awesome it will attain.  Five pens is the most awesome.    If a book is utter trash, unfit to grace the shelves of even a thrift store, it will be awarded a sword.   The amount of swords is equal to the level of disgust.  Five swords is the worst book in creation.

Now that the rules have been established, let’s take a look at Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood’s novel, Oryx and Crake.  Within the pages of this text, we follow the main character Jimmy as his mind crumbles around him in a post-apocalyptic setting.  Through the plot, we learn that Jimmy had a terrible childhood, was a womanizer, and was best friends with a more subtly disturbed individual named Crake.  While it is natural to despise Jimmy for all of his short-comings, Atwood does a splendid job of keeping the reader engaged in his story.

As Jimmy’s sanity is failing, the entire book is flashbacks to the world before it effectively ended.  We see pieces of Jimmy’s life:  his mother’s unhappy presence, Jimmy’s reaction to her departure, his friendship with Crake, and a string of mostly nameless women with whom Jimmy has intimate relations.