Jon Mabbs

The writing is painful, jumping between pre and post apocalypse, dangling the cause like a carrot on a stick for 350 pages. The reveal is written from the protagonist's (if you can call him that) perspective so we don't even get any real answers as to Crake's true motivations and plan. The characters are unrelatable and unrealistic, with little to no character arc. The author has chosen several wild sci-fi topics with little understanding of them in any depth and on a personal note her writing of two young boys binge watching pornographic and gore videos simultaneously for hours on end as a daily recreational activity is ludicrous. In summary I found it to be a poorly written story that keeps you waiting for the big reveal that just isn't worth it. Do not read. Spoilers and biggest pain points: -for the first two thirds of the book oryx and snowman are written like they are in a meaningful, exclusive relationship only for us to find out in the final 50 pages that she is crakes slam piece and only sees snowman in secret -i believe oryx was only hired by crake because she was or at least looks like the girl from the porn site. So a sex traffic victim/worker was hired in a key position of responsibility on the worlds most significant science project because he thought without any confirmation snowman liked her photo years prior? Insane logic and there's examples of things like this throughout. -oryx was hired by crake to convince snowman to care for the crakers (at least this was my interpretation of his 'plan') but he wouldn't approve of them being intimate together, they needed to go behind his back. But also oryx loves crake for some reason? -crake kills oryx and it is unexplained. I assume because they are both infected but it also mentions that crake knew of a vaccine so why did they need to die. -the catastrophe caused by crake is never explained if it is intentional or why he would do it. -finally snowman finds some other humans at the end and it just finishes before he even does anything which would have been a fine ending like lord of the flies if there was any real story substance or character development in this book. Again, do not read