MADDADDAM by Margaret Atwood

I have to confess that I barely remember anything about the first two books in this series—Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood.  No matter.  Toby and Zeb and a few others are survivors of the plague brought on by Crake in his effort to wipe out humanity and replace our species with genetically engineered beings, the Children of Crake, or Crakers, who are completely innocent and devoid of malice.  They munch on kudzu and have no use for clothing, or what they perceive as a second skin.  We learn Zeb’s story, as he tells it to Toby, his lover and a sort of medicine woman. Toby is the central character here who finds herself the appointed storyteller for humoring the Crakers, who jump to unexpected conclusions.  Toby manufactures bigger and bigger whoppers, sometimes just to avoid having to explain something like the “f” word.  Zeb’s history is fodder for some of these stories, but they need no embellishment.  His escapades are the stuff of James Bond novels—wild, crazy, daring, and sometimes violent.  Oh, and he describes himself as a babe magnet.  What’s not to love?  And, for me, this is ultimately a love story, even though this book is the conclusion of a trilogy about rebooting civilization.  When Toby introduces the Crakers to reading and writing, we can see how she is jumpstarting their society to more advanced methods of keeping track of their own history, even though their perceptions of it are extremely skewed.