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A review by bmartino
Feed by Mira Grant
4.0
3.75 stars. A little slow at the beginning, but it picked up about 100 pages in and I couldn't put it down after that. Stylistically well written, with a couple plot problems.
A book like this is tricky - when the focus is "near future" technology, it's so easy to get it wrong. When someone reads the book a couple years after it's published, you hate to see it already be out-of-date and completely unrealistic. Especially these days, where media has changed *so much* in the last 10 years, it's impossible to actually predict how it will look 28 years in the future. This book teeters between making the social media world vague enough for it to still sound plausible in several years, and providing enough details to make it already feel out of date. My final reaction was similar to some other reviewers, in that bloggers are already making a huge difference in the news world. Thirty years from now, why is it such a huge deal that they've been invited on a presidential campaign? That particular detail made it seem like this book was already written 5 years ago.
I do admire the tactic of making the zombies in the book behave exactly like classic movie zombies. It saves a ton of time in having to explain what is expected of them. The reader isn't hit repeatedly in the face with how "Our Zombies are Different." (ref. TVtropes.org) Much more fun this way.
Where the book really fell down for me, however, was the final confrontation with the immediate villain. ("Immediate" in that the shadowy conspirators are presumably left for the sequels.) Talk about one-note and cliched. They actually got him *monologuing* about why he did what he did, and again it felt like this might have been written 3-5 years ago, when people wanted to ascribe the same kinds of motivations to the Bush administration. This wasn't the only example of lack of character depth and development, just the most egregious, and ultimately keeps this book from being really spectacular.
I know that sequel(s) are already planned, and don't get me wrong, I enjoyed reading Feed, but I think I'm content to leave the series where it ended here. Sometimes one-and-done is the best way to go.
A book like this is tricky - when the focus is "near future" technology, it's so easy to get it wrong. When someone reads the book a couple years after it's published, you hate to see it already be out-of-date and completely unrealistic. Especially these days, where media has changed *so much* in the last 10 years, it's impossible to actually predict how it will look 28 years in the future. This book teeters between making the social media world vague enough for it to still sound plausible in several years, and providing enough details to make it already feel out of date. My final reaction was similar to some other reviewers, in that bloggers are already making a huge difference in the news world. Thirty years from now, why is it such a huge deal that they've been invited on a presidential campaign? That particular detail made it seem like this book was already written 5 years ago.
I do admire the tactic of making the zombies in the book behave exactly like classic movie zombies. It saves a ton of time in having to explain what is expected of them. The reader isn't hit repeatedly in the face with how "Our Zombies are Different." (ref. TVtropes.org) Much more fun this way.
Where the book really fell down for me, however, was the final confrontation with the immediate villain. ("Immediate" in that the shadowy conspirators are presumably left for the sequels.) Talk about one-note and cliched. They actually got him *monologuing* about why he did what he did, and again it felt like this might have been written 3-5 years ago, when people wanted to ascribe the same kinds of motivations to the Bush administration. This wasn't the only example of lack of character depth and development, just the most egregious, and ultimately keeps this book from being really spectacular.
I know that sequel(s) are already planned, and don't get me wrong, I enjoyed reading Feed, but I think I'm content to leave the series where it ended here. Sometimes one-and-done is the best way to go.