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Title: Feed (Boston Globe-Horn Book Honors) by M. T. Anderson ISBN: 0-7636-1726-1 Publisher: Candlewick Press Pub. Date: October, 2002 Format: School & Library Binding Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.13 (30 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Satire may soar over the heads of young readers
Comment: Imagine instant-messaging your friends in your mind. Imagine all those obnoxious computer pop-up ads happening right in your brain. Imagine retailers knowing precisely what you've ever bought, your favorite color, your shoe size. Imagine liking it. This is the scary, weird world described in M.T. Anderson's "Feed". Titus and his friends are average middle-class American teenagers of the future. They take for granted the weird convergence of technology, corporate intervention, and mind-control they live with known as a feed. Enter Violet; a girl Titus meets on spring break, a girl who wants to 'fight the feed'.
There are important and compelling issues raised in this novel about advertising, privacy, conformity, individualism and technology. It's a book that demands discussion, explanation and consideration. Unfortunately, I think that much of it may be over the heads of its teenaged target audience. Readers who need things spelled out may be challenged by this book because significant aspects of the setting (and what a grim future it is) are implied, or only mentioned in passing. I think few teenagers will be satisfied with the ending. And fewer still will probably spend much time thinking about the issues in the story after they've put it down. It's too bad that the profanity and few mild references to sexual situations will keep this book out of most classrooms, because it's really a story that deserves to be discussed, especially by young adults.
I do recommend this book for advanced and thoughtful teen readers. Sci-fi fans in particular will enjoy it. Other readers should appreciate the accurate portrayal of teen dating, cliques, jealousies, insecurities and friendships. I hope the larger, more important themes of the book will be grasped as well.
Rating: 4
Summary: Needin' the feedin'
Comment: I give books a certain amount of credit if, after reading them, I find myself unduly influenced by their message in my daily life. Take "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever" for example. Read that book through and then try to watch a pageant on your own without remembering the book's fantastically written scenes. Good writing engenders creative thinking. So a large amount of cred should fall on M.T. Anderson's "Feed". Though it admittedly has a number of strikes against it, I challenge you to walk around a mall or watch television after reading every word of this beautifully thought out book cover to cover. If you don't, consequently, find yourself trapped in the eerie uber-consumerism of this modern day and age, then obviously you were only skimming this clever little novella. And I wouldn't be able to blame you. Anderson has undertaken a very difficult task. First of all, this kind of message has (to some extent) been done to death. Yes yes yes, the world is full of too much advertising and consumerism. Yes yes, it's bad. We know. Thank you. Second, he has placed his book in the future and has invented a kind of futuristic slang that, while interesting and consistent (Mr. Anderson never errs or disobeys his own rules) is nonetheless difficult to get into. Some readers are going to have difficulties dealing with people calling one another "unit" (an upgrade on our currently popular "dude") or saying things are "meg" this and "meg" that. It is meg annoying at first (see?), but keep at it. Read on and this brave little new world becomes incredibly interesting. Here, humans that can afford it are wired directly to the internet. Forget having the web on the brain. Now the web is IN your brain, controlling the human body's daily functions and activities.
Today, teens hungry for futuristic sci-fi can have their fill with such titles as "Jennifer Government", but I give this book, in particular, a lot more credit. The author takes this world to its obvious extreme, making a girl who is a poor consumer into a victim of corporate medical care (or in this case, poor tech support). More importantly, the author never loses sight of certain facts. Our hero is undoubtedly rich and his moneyed family allows him a greater amount of leeway with things like school trips and purchases. His poorer girlfriend suffers from living in a world where consumerism has been literally wired to the brain. It is this character that will readily point out that many Americans do not have access to "the feed", their name for the internal internet link. The poor are always with us. They just don't advertise their existence particularly well. This book is basically the adventures of a very average joe schmoe who doesn't really care for international strife (of which there is quite a lot) or anything particularly unpleasant (his girlfriend's physical collapse being an excellent example). And how different is this charming young man from most Americans today? His is a world where the feed, in Homer Simpson's words, "Isn't afraid to tell the truth. That everything's just fine". Parents please note, this book is chock full of swearing. If that bothers you, fine. But if it doesn't, I commend you. The book will make anyone reading it think. For that reason alone, I recommend it to anyone and everyone.
Rating: 4
Summary: Fictional science or future prediction?
Comment: M. T. Anderson has written a refreshing science fiction novel in a genre that has recently relied largely on fantasy and far less on science. He has created a not-to-distant future world where everything is accessed via a "feed" that is implanted directly into the brain. An internalized internet, the feed even allows for "chatting" so there is little need to speak if one chooses not to and true reading is nearly obsolete.
While the narrator, Titus, lives in a world that is still identifiable to those of us in the 21st century - school (although it is trademarked), parties, music, driving, dancing, and drinking - there are also unfamiliar and extreme aspects like an electronic drug substitute, standardized lingo, disposable tables, and extreme consumerism. Even this tightly controlled future however, is peppered with resisters, and Titus' own girlfriend suffers horribly from her feed when it malfunctions due to a combination of having it implanted late in life (when she was 7) and being hit by a "hacker".
Perhaps because it is a young adult novel, Anderson just barely skims the surface of the economic, political and environmental tensions of the feed and its consumer culture. He does not, however, wimp out in building believable, dimensional characters and relationships.
Anderson has created an intriguing read about a world that is so close you may be reading about the first "feed" in the newspaper tomorrow.
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Title: Son of the Mob by Gordon Korman ISBN: 0786807695 Publisher: Hyperion Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $15.99 |
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Title: Postcards from No Man's Land by Aidan Chambers ISBN: 0525468633 Publisher: Dutton Books Pub. Date: June, 2002 List Price(USD): $19.99 |
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