Feed By: M.T Anderson

Title: Feed
Author: M.T Anderson
Level: Young Adult
Pages: 240
Published: 2002


Identity crises, consumerism, and star-crossed teenage love in a futuristic society where people connect to the Internet via feeds implanted in their brains.

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 teenage 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., M. T. Anderson has created a not-so-brave new world — and a smart, savage satire that has captivated readers with its view of an imagined future that veers unnervingly close to the here and now.

Review:

When I first picked up this book and read the synopsis, I absolutely fell in love with it. I had already declared it one of my favorite books because it seemed so great.

It certainly did not live up to my expectations. One of the many things that I didn't like about this book was the language. The author said that he spent time in malls and reading text messages to come up with the language, but the book was published in 2002 and no one even talks like that now.

Second, from the first page I felt that I was reading the sequel in a series. I had no idea what was going on from the very beginning. The plot was so confusing because I thought the book was a sort of dystopian type novel and it wasn't. I really didn't understand either because the characters would get lesions as a sort of fashion statement and from up above it says "an imagined future that veers unnervingly close to here and now". Oh really? So now we get lesions? I had no idea.

Also, in the middle of a chapter there would be  advertisements because the feed was constantly advertising to the characters, but I wasn't a character so why would that be put in the book? It just didn't make any sense.

I also didn't like any of the characters. I found Titus to be rather annoying because at the beginning he was so ignorant and at the end it seemed like he hadn't changed. He was also so oblivious to his friends being rude to Violet.

Overall, I did not enjoy this book one bit. I was just reading to finish.

Cover: 2/5

Character Rating: 1/5

Style: 0/5

Development: 3/5

Overall: *