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This photo was taken during the Vancouver riots on June 15. There are no words for how much I'm in love.

Photo by Rich Lam/Getty Images

stepping into that same river again, or not

I first read Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake perhaps five years ago. A stunning experience. As I neared the end of the book, I could not escape the feeling that once I looked up from the last page, I would see a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Snowman's world. My reading would make it so. Fortunately, that did not happen. Instead, Oryx and Crake earned its place in my top all-time reading experiences.

So it took me until a few weeks ago to pick up The Year of the Flood, Atwood's companion book. How could it be anything but a disappointment after my visceral awe at Oryx and Crake? Having completed it I must say it was not as extraordinary. How could it? But it was still brilliant.

The Year of the Flood follows two protagonists who--similar to Snowman/Jimmy--bounce back and forth between their current post-pandemic survival and their lives before the world ended. Seemingly random main characters in the beginning, as the book continues, the reader realizes these two, Ren and Toby, were both part of an environmentalist religious cult before the "waterless flood." As the narrative continues, the reader realizes that they were both on the periphery of Jimmy/Snowman and Crake's lives. I went back to reread Oryx and Crake so that I could appreciate those tiny tossed away sentences that were all that Ren and Toby (not even named in the original book) contributed to Jimmy's life.

Much of the book centers around the cult, God's Gardeners. Despite the pages of ink dedicated to them one cannot in the end know if they are a force behind Crake's plague or lucky survivalists. And again, this mirrors

Oryx and Crake. Are the leaders of God's Gardeners MaddAdam? How much does Oryx know.

And I must say, perhaps my favorite part of the book was when Ren and Toby see Snowman. Despite all of the voices in his head throughout Oryx and Crake, I never thought of him as crazy. It seemed a perfectly natural reaction to being the last human alive, guardian to a new race and pawn of your best friend. It was only after reading Flood that I saw he was insane. And it broke my heart. It made the rereading of Oryx and Crake so much sadder, lushly pathetic.

Lots of parallels, but plenty of divergent plot and themes to make The Year of the Flood a masterpiece in its own right. A true companion to the first.