Book Review: "Big Little Lies" by Liane Moriarty

You know those books that keep you up reading late into the night? For me, Liane Moriarty's Big Little Lies was one of those books. Initially, I was a bit thrown off by the structure of the story; moving back in time and counting down to the big event that the entire story builds toward with inserts of police interview narrative taking place after the big event. In the beginning, I read the police interview snippets and only hoped to remember everyone's name to see if the information became relevant. I soon found that those interview snippets reinforced one of the main themes in the book: the power of gossip and biased observations.

Once I got used to the structure, I was quickly swept up into the lives of the three main perspective characters. There is Madeline, a force of a woman and mother, who toes the line between being headstrong and being a bully. Bullying is another theme in this story, and Moriarty makes it clear that it is not a behavior contained to childhood playgrounds, but a behavior that can follow people into their adult lives with horrific psychological effects. Madeline is an aging, re-married divorcee struggling with the fact that her ex-husband and his perfect yoga Barbie doll of a wife have moved to the same town and their children all attend the same school. I found Madeline to be an acquired taste as she is rather rash in her decision making and much more likely to follow emotional impetus than take a rational approach.

Book Review: "Oryx and Crake" by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel Oryx and Crake was published back in 2003. I don't know how I managed to read so much dystopian fiction, including Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and never came across this trilogy. I've remedied that oversight.

Oryx and Crake is set in the future and follows a man who goes by the name of Snowman who may just be be the last human alive. Snowman lives as a kind of guardian of the Crakers, a genetically modified humanoid species that he has liberated from their life in a dwindling habitat under a great dome of biological experimentation. As we follow Snowman's (Jimmy's) depressing daily routine and slow starvation we are introduced to his back story, and hence the back story of this broken world. The structure of the story clips back and forth between the story of Jimmy's childhood and early adulthood and Snowman's journey into wild territory to forage for survival supplies.

Some readers may not like the back and forth structure, but the sections flow seamlessly into one another. The pace is aided by this structure and is relentless in the unfolding of the greater story. Atwood excels in making Jimmy a well realized character with a childhood spent living in corporate science established compounds. These compounds are the gated communities of the elite set apart from the pleeblands where the general population resides. Such social stratification already exists in many ways, so Atwood is merely enhancing the nightmarish possibilities that could emerge from unchecked biological science and corporate influence.