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ETA: Since this is probably my most controversial review, and the one that gets the most responses, I decided to go through and clean up some of the typos. I actually find it amusing how extreme the reactions to it are, and how upset people get when I don't like their favorite book. I'm not saying you can't like it, just that I don't. (And also, you can bitch at me all you want, I'm not changing my mind.) But! I have finally found a Margaret Atwood book I don't hate! I gave her one more shot with The Handmaid’s Tale, and this time, she did not disappoint.

--Original review below--

I am calling complete, and total, bullshit.

There are so many things wrong with this book that it's hard to know where to begin. For starters, the idea of having a couple of different timelines going at once, and shifting tenses according--present tense for the present, regular past tenses for the past--causes some serious grammatical problems, and is an utter BS plot device. I'm not a huge fan of telling a story through flashbacks, but it can be done reasonably while retaining proper grammar. It's not brain surgery.

I admit that I went into this book predisposed not to like it, for a variety of reasons. I didn't like The Blind Assassin (yes, I might be the only person IN THE WORLD who can say that), but I thought that I should be fair and give an author another chance before I made up my mind. I do usually enjoy dystopian literature, but only when it's done well--and that only happens rarely. Her basic idea was kind of interesting (if done better in Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, and even that had its problems), but the execution was fatally flawed. I don't know much about science, but I do know that some of the research was wrong and the timelines don't add up. She seemed like she researched just enough to be able to throw words around, but not enough to use them correctly--a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. The biggest problem was the characters, though: three such utterly unsympathetic main characters do not make it easy to like anything about the story. Crake was a rabid dog that needed to be put down a lot sooner than he was, Oryx was probably insane and too cold to make you care, and Snowman was just too damn stupid. Also, the fact that we meet two of the characters while they're watching child porn means I want them in the electric chair, not that I care about their personal problems.

The biggest problem I have with Atwood, though, is a problem that seems to be systemic in her works: she's so bloody arrogant. When you open one of her books, you're immediately hit in the face by a thought bubble: She is writing World Changing Literature, and you should grovel before her genius. You have to dig through layers of ego just to get to the plot. She has talent, no doubt, but she is so full of herself and her ability to be a Literary Writer that you miss the book forest for the literary trees.

Also-also, she probably thought that ending was clever, but it was, in fact, a cop-out. She was bored with the book, she wanted to end it, so she did. It must be convenient to not have to actually tie up her loose ends.

In summary, I am clearly too much of a plebeian to appreciate the full extent of her genius, and I should crawl back to the benighted hole from whence I came.