Book 51: Feed
M.T. Anderson
2002
Candlewick Press
Rating:
2.5
Amazon.com Review
This brilliantly ironic satire is set in a future world where television and computers are connected directly into people's brains when they are babies. The result is a chillingly recognizable consumer society where empty-headed kids are driven by fashion and shopping and the avid pursuit of silly entertainment--even on trips to Mars and the moon--and by constant customized murmurs in their brains of encouragement to buy, buy, buy.
Anderson gives us this world through the voice of a boy who, like everyone around him, is almost completely inarticulate, whose vocabulary, in a dead-on parody of the worst teenspeak, depends heavily on three words: "like," "thing," and the second most common English obscenity. He's even made this vapid kid a bit sympathetic, as a product of his society who dimly knows something is missing in his head. The details are bitterly funny--the idiotic but wildly popular sitcom called "Oh? Wow! Thing!", the girls who have to retire to the ladies room a couple of times an evening because hairstyles have changed, the hideous lesions on everyone that are not only accepted, but turned into a fashion statement. And the ultimate awfulness is that when we finally meet the boy's parents, they are just as inarticulate and empty-headed as he is, and their solution to their son's problem is to buy him an expensive car.
Although there is a danger that at first teens may see the idea of brain-computers as cool, ultimately they will recognize this as a fascinating novel that says something important about their world. (Ages 14 and older) --Patty Campbell
What Do I Think?
Going into this book, I had high hopes. I thought 'Hey, this is an amazing concept. Google in the brain, that'd be awesome!' No, no it wouldn't. Having the entire internet in your brain makes you loose all humanly instincts and, well, boring. Just like this book Quite honestly, I absoltely loved the concept, but the novel itself was not very good at all. I did not connect with the characters the way I would have liked to and the plot-line was blan. Good concept, though.
