Review: Feed

Title: Feed
Author: M. T. Anderson
Publisher: Candlewick
Publication Date: March 4, 2004
Reviewer: Annie

Summary: (From Amazon) For Titus and his friends, it started out like any ordinary trip to the moon — a chance to party during spring break and play with some stupid low-grav at the Ricochet Lounge. But that was before the crazy hacker caused all their feeds to malfunction, sending them to the hospital to lie around with nothing inside their heads for days. And it was before Titus met Violet, a beautiful, brainy girl who has decided to fight the feed and its omnipresent ability to categorize human thoughts and desires. Following in the footsteps of George Orwell, Anthony Burgess, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr., National Book Award winner M. T. Anderson creates a not-so-brave new world — and a smart, savage satire ushering us into an imagined future that veers unnervingly close to the here and now.

Review: This book takes place in a very futuristic society. A time when traveling to the moon is like traveling to Cancun for spring break, and most houses are built underground or in domes. Everyone is tied into a computer, and the computer becomes part of them so anything they could want to know at any point is at their fingertips as part of their feed.

I think many of the ideas in this book were great, and I could see many of them possibly happening in our future, especially the overload of technology. I think I would’ve loved seeing some of these ideas put into an adult book because there are many ways it can be taken and this book felt particularly young. I really wanted to know more about the world they lived in and everything Violet always talked about. I was very frustrated with most of the characters and that they didn’t seem to know anything about their world, and it is a scary possibility that this could actually happen in our future. I’ve heard this book classified as a cyberpunk novel which is basically a different look on the dystopian genre, but worth a read if you are hooked on the genre and looking for something a bit different.

~ Annie