"The Year of the Flood" by Margaret Atwood is the successor to "Oryx and Crake" and delivers a completely different experience; you won't be reading much about Snowman in this installment.
Instead it follows the lives of two characters much in the style of the first book, right before the plague rips through the earth and demolishes most human life. Both are members of the Gardener sect casually mentioned by Snowman in the first book and appear to be foils of one-another.
Once again Atwood took on the concept of perspective and time and played with them: pay careful attention at the beginning and end of chapters and you'll be fine. Being slingshot around like this is jarring, but I have a feeling it was intentional in order to create for the reader a sense of what living in this future utopia/dystopia as the last remaining would feel like; living day-to-day with the horror of memory to break up the monotony.
Atwood plays short games of tag with the characters and situations presented in "Oryx and Crake". You can tell Atwood wrote these books together or at least with the stories crossing in mind. Some of the previous aspects of the society that were left to the imagination before were dredged up and put to the forefront here, with cameos of the characters from the previous installment.
All in all it's another home run. This woman has got it! Unfortunately the next (and last) part of the trilogy has yet to be complete; she's planning a 2013 publish for "Maddaddam".
This is another must-read for science-fiction genre enthusiasts, and I implore others to do the same. Atwood's raising plenty of interesting questions in this new world, and morality plays a big part.
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