Heidi Hart

My college roommate urged me to read this series, and I tried... Lord, how I tried. I spent three weeks on bed rest at the end of my pregnancy, then my entire maternity leave, then most of the summer trying to get through Oryx and Crake (book one), to say nothing of the rest of the trilogy. While I loved the writing -- and I do love Margaret Atwood's prose -- the book just couldn't hold my attention. I think it's the subject matter: dystopian fiction just isn't for me. The world we have is scary and screwed up enough without reading about how much worse everything will be in a not-so-distant future for entertainment. I'm not such an escapist that everything I read has to be sweetness and light--I read a lot of history, a lot of true crime, and plenty of general fiction about fairly grim subjects--but I'm frightened enough about what our world is coming to that I don't want to read a post-apocalyptic account of the world my kids will inherit, especially not while I'm at home recovering from and celebrating the birth of one of those kids.