The Year of the Flood

“You can't live with such fears and keep on whistling. The waiting builds up in you like a tide. You start wanting it to be done with. You find yourself saying to the sky, Just do it. Do your worst. Get it over with. She could feel the coming tremor of it running through her spine, asleep or awake....”

Well. Year of the Flood. If one-quarter of the horrible things that happened in this book were to occur in the world, I would hate to still be around. A dystopia as bleak as The Road. Almost as bleak as The Road. The Road is bleak.

Let's see if I can reveal a little about the plot. The creatures of the earth are changing rapidly. A corporation is using biotechnology to merge species for their own purposes and to inflict disease on those it doesn't like. At the same time, a cult has developed that holds the creatures of the earth as sacred.

The story is told from the points of view of Ren and Toby, two young women, in alternating chapters. Other important characters are Ren's friend, Amanda; Zeb, Ren's stepfather; Jimmy, Ren's boyfriend; the Painballers, a group who seem almost without human feeling after being punished in subhuman ways; and Adam One, the leader of the cult, the Gardeners.

The story shifts from year five to year ten and on up, to year twenty-five, the year of the flood. A natural disaster (“the waterless flood”) occurs in year twenty-five and most of humanity is destroyed.

Every page made me think, about human life, about relationships, about ecology, about kindness and cruelty. A very thoughtful, if scary book.