We love books here at the Editorial Department...even the ones we weren't personally involved with.  However, with dozens of newspapers, magazines and websites covering new releases, it can be difficult to keep track of what people are saying about books newly on shelves.  To try to resolve that dilemma, we offer our Tuesday Review Wrapup, using the last sentences of prominent book reviews as literary tea leaves to discern the trends guiding our industry.  This week, we're looking at Margaret Atwood's new novel, The Year of the Flood.

"I found the final sentences of the book unexpected, not the seemingly inevitable brutal end or dying fall, nor yet a deus-ex-machina salvation, but a surprise, a mystery. Who are the people coming with torches, singing? You must read this extraordinary novel and decide for yourself."  -- Ursula K Le Guin, The Guardian.

"In "The Year of the Flood," she continues to explore her answers to those questions. But her vision is more Revelations than Genesis, and as Apocalypse stories go, it's as dull as it gets."  -- Melanie Kirkpatrick, Wall Street Journal.

"Still, the book regularly undercuts the horrific with touches of comedy -- Ren talks about her work at Scales and Tails as "the daily grind" -- and Atwood superbly captures the voices and attitudes of the serious Adam One, the frivolous Lucerne, the resourceful Toby and the rather simple-minded and fragile Ren. Canada's greatest living novelist undoubtedly knows how to tell a gripping story, as fans of "The Blind Assassin" and "The Handmaid's Tale" already know. But here there's a serious message, too: Look at what we're doing right now to our world, to nature, to ourselves. If this goes on . . ."  -- The Washington Post.

"The flaws in “The Year of the Flood” are part of the pleasure, as they are with human beings, that species so threatened by its own impending suicide and held up here for us to look at, mourn over, laugh at and hope for. Atwood knows how to show us ourselves, but the mirror she holds up to life does more than reflect — it’s like one of those mirrors made with mercury that gives us both a deepening and a distorting effect, allowing both the depths of human nature and its potential mutations. We don’t know how we will evolve, or if we will evolve at all. “The Year of the Flood” isn’t prophecy, but it is eerily ­possible."  -- Jeanette Winterson, The New York Times

"For all the unreality of her imagined universe, Atwood grounds her story in the bedrock of good storytelling: our shared, if endangered, humanity"  -- Thom Geier, Entertainment Weekly