MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood

★★★★

"There's the story and then there's the real story and then there's the story of how the story came to be told.  Then there's what you leave out of the story.  Which is part of the story too."

The third (and final?) books in the MaddAddam Trilogy left off right where the first and second parallel stories ended.  The first book was told by 'Snowman-the-Jimmy' and the second alternated between the two female characters of Ren and Toby.  The third novel is mostly told from the perspective of Amanda and her stepfather Zeb.  The previous characters are mentioned as well, but the read doesn't really get an inside view into what they're thinking or feeling about what is going on.  There is a lot a back story that explains how the 'Waterless Flood' happened and Crake's history.

For me, this book feel somewhere in the middle of the other two.  I wasn't as impressed by it as the first, but I felt it was a much better story than the second.  I enjoyed reading about how the lives of the characters continued and how everyone interacted once the were reunited.  They basically built their own post-apocalyptic colony and had to face all of the challenges of living in a world where basically everyone has been destroyed.  They also had to figure out how to co-exist with the Crakers, a more gentler species of humans left to inhabit the earth.  The situations that the characters are faced with are very real and I was very captivated by the continual world-building that Atwood created in the first novel.  I felt like most of the questions were answered but, I still am left wondering how all of these different people survived - were they all given an antidote or did I miss something?

So overall - not as good as the first, but well worth the read and I'm glad I finished the series.