Feed by M.T. Anderson

My husband bought Feed for me at a children's media conference in Athens back in the spring and got it autographed. (That's Athens, Georgia, not Athens, Greece, just to be clear!) Before I met up with him, he was reading it. He basically held it hostage until he finished it.

Now I understand why. I finally found where he had stashed it, and started reading it this morning before work. When I got home from errands and dinner, I sat down to read it (just while some software downloaded, you know), and didn't put it down until I finished it.

Feed is fascinating, terrifying, and heart-wrenching. On the surface, it's a futuristic dystopian novel, full of original ideas and familiar archetypes. At its heart, it's a sobering commentary on today's media-driven blindness and consumerism, woven around convincing characters.

It's also terribly sad, in the vein of The Hunger Games, The Giver, Unwind, and The Roar. (I don't recommend reading them together if you value your sanity. Disregard my advice at your own peril.)

In the future, everyone who matters has the feed implanted. What's the feed? It's Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Wikipedia, eBay, Amazon, GPS, instant messaging, and email, all in one. Throw in every banner ad, Flash animation, Javascript, pop-up, and pop-under you've ever seen. Add scents, taste, and touch.

Now jam them all in your skull, all at once, all the time, and give them carte blanche to scan your emotions, thoughts, and sensory input. Tie it all in to every part of your brain; that's the feed.

Titus is a priveleged, upper-middle-class to upper-class teenager. He and his friends spend their days in pursuit of pleasure and stuff. In many ways, he's like any other teenager…except that he and his friends aren't capable of much in the way of original thought. Of course, if your brain were constantly assaulted with that much input, all of it directed by the mega-corporations, you wouldn't by able to concentrate on anything of consequence for longer than two minutes, either.

The world of Feed is so far out of whack that it really stretches the suspension of disbelief at first. However, Anderson makes a convincing case for its gradual evolution. With thought, it's easy to see how our current consumerist culture with its information overload and insular focus could become a pervasive, all-controlling crutch.

Lest you think I'm a whacko nutjob who's down on capitalism and sees a conspiracy behind every bush, let me set the record straight. I like capitalism and a free-market economy. I also like media, technology, and gadgets. However, I also see the danger in allowing those things to blind us to what's far more important: people and freedom. The freedom to make our own choices, the freedom to think for ourselves, the freedom to control our destiny. In the world of the feed, there is nothing without the flood of information. Every decision, every thought, every emotion is driven by the messages from corporations and media. Adults sound just like the teenagers. The main character claims, "That's one of the great things about the feed--that you can be supersmart without ever working...You can look things up automatic." However, few people ever actually learn anything of consequence. Instead, they look up factoids (think Wikipedia, but shallower); there's precious little reasoning or evaluation. Even the president's speeches sound as if they were written by a sixteen-year-old stoner, and his vocabulary matches that.

Until Titus meets Violet, a girl who has been raised on the fringes of the current society, he never thinks about what's going on outside of his corner of the feed. The world beyond the more priveleged areas of developing countries is falling apart; the Earth's environment is all but dead. Nearly everything is disposable. People from every level of society have terrible, weeping lesions on their skin, but everyone shrugs it off. In fact, lesions--something that should scare every thinking person--become a fashion statement.

Despite the inherent bleakness of the storyline, Anderson offers us a ray of hope through Titus and Violet. As affairs grow blacker, Violet's inquisitive mind and indomitable spirit drive her to resist the feed and challenge Titus to take an active role in his own life. Thanks to Anderson's insightful storytelling, we can join the ride.

This is an extended version of the review from my regular blog.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins*

Written for a young adult audience, The Hunger Games is set in Panem, a nation formed from the remains of the United States. Many years earlier, the entire country fell apart, splitting into thirteen districts and ruled from the new Capitol. Seventy years earlier, the poor, outlying districts rebelled against the Capitol. They were utterly defeated, and District Thirteen was totally wiped out.

To remind the districts of how much they're under the control of the Capitol, those in charge instituted the Hunger Games. Once each year, the Capitol has a massive "festival" nationwide–the Reaping– with a mandatory mass gathering in each district. At the festival, the names of each child in the district age twelve through eighteen are placed in two glass balls (one for boys, one for girls). One boy and one girl are chosen in each district, and those two "tributes" are whisked away to the Capitol. These tributes are given the "honor" of participating in the Hunger Games, where only one can survive. It's proceeded by a week of testing and interviews, all of which is televised to the nation. (Again, it's mandatory viewing.) If the tributes impress the audience, sponsors can pay to drop a gift to that kid once the games start–tools, food, medicine, clothes, weapons. So the kids must each put on a good show, or else they'll die fast.

The number of entries each child receives depends upon age–one additional entry goes in each year–as well as any extra shares their family has received. A family may receive a year's share of food and oil for each person, in exchange for an extra entry for each person receiving assistance. A poor child from even a small family can have their name entered dozens of times before they're in the clear.

The people of the Capitol, by contrast, live lives of such privilege that it's beyond the imagination of citizens in the districts. While hundreds die of starvation, party goers in the Capitol vomit between courses simply so they can go another round. In the districts, children and adults die of minor illnesses and slight injuries; in the Capitol, they can have even extreme injuries healed without a scar and spend a fortune on elective cosmetic surgeries to follow the latest trends.

The main characters, Katniss and Peeta, are from District Twelve (Appalachia), one of the poorest districts. Katniss enters the games by choice, volunteering as a replacement when her twelve-year-old sister's name is chosen. Peeta, who is the same age as Katniss and from a family with a steady income, is chosen by lot. By the rules, they must work earnestly to kill each other; but each has reason to want the other to live.

A full cast of well-developed characters. Brutal plot. Redemption. Emotionally wrenching from beginning to end. Check it out immediately.

Note: I wrote this review back in October, but forgot to post it! Too much trouble to rewrite it. :)

Rules by Cynthia Lord

A couple of weeks ago, my husband left me alone in a car with a book from his elementary school's library while he "picked up a couple of things." When he got back with two full bags of groceries, I was on page thirty-something. So I read the rest of the way home, and took it on the bus with me the next morning.

I finished it by the time I got to work the next day.

Rules is a Newbery Honor winner from 2007. It's the story of twelve-year-old Catherine, big sister to eight-year-old David. Her life is a little different: David is autistic, and family life revolves around his therapy sessions and his rules.

One of Catherine's goals is to teach David all the little things that everyone just picks up in everyday life. Things like, "No toys in the fish tank," "'Late' doesn't mean 'not coming,'", and "It's okay to hug Mom but not the clerk at the video store." She wants him to be able to function in the world one day.

My favorite rule may be, "Keep your pants on in public unless Mom, Dad, or the doctor tells you to take them off." I can certainly relate; when we visited Helen in September, the whole family was trying to teach one of my nephews that!

What is remarkable about Rules is the realistic characters, especially Catherine. Though it's clear she loves her brother very much and wants what's best for him, she's torn by a desire to have a normal life, with normal friends. Her family and friends are likewise

It's a lesson in true friends, and in what matters. And amazingly, it's never condescending or preachy…just fun and thought-provoking.

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents has to be one of my favorite Discworld novels ever! I started reading through the entire Discworld series last year, and the only one I haven't enjoyed so far is Thief of Time. Terry Pratchett is an astounding storyteller, and an absolute genius.

The Amazing Maurice and his trained rats, along with their rat piper scheme, are first mentioned in Reaper Man. (Kind of amazing that their scheme seems to have worked in Ankh Morpork, isn't it? Vetinari, scammed?)

But that's the book's only connection to Ankh-Morpkh, except for Unseen University's trash heap. (Where do you think talking cats and rats come from?) Maurice is a talking, thinking cat, who has teamed up with a clan of talking, thinking rats in a most unusual get-rich-quick scheme. Together with a stupid-looking kid, a young guy interested only in playing his pipes, they infiltrate cities, make a fuss, and get the cities to pay "Stupid-Looking Kid" to pipe the rats out of the city.

Things go wrong once they reach Bad Blintz, though. The daughter of the mayor is the granddaughter of one of the Sisters Grimm, and is convinced life is just like stories. The rat catchers claim to find hundreds of rats, but the thinking rats can't find a sign of them. And the city is suffering from a terrible, rat-induced famine.

Not a city conducive to profit. Not such a bad beginning for a story with a happy ending, though.

It's such a fascinating story that I don't want to spoil it. It's almost entirely from the point of view of either the cat or one of the rats. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, it's one of the best explorations of what it means to overcome your nature, and choosing what type of person you want to be.

Magic's Pawn: The Last Herald-Mage, Book 1 by Mercedes Lackey

Though I'm often annoyed by Mercedes Lackey's compulsion to drop gratuitous sexual scenes in unexpectedly, I've enjoyed all the Valdemar books I've read so far. They have featured well-developed characters, thought-provoking story lines, and a fascinating system of magic. Since this trilogy tells the story of the legendary Herald-Mage Vanyel from Valdemar's history, I had hopes.

That all went out of the window with Magic's Pawn.

This book, which I've seen praised as Mercedes Lackey's best Valdemar book, is the worst I've read yet from her. The story is boring and insipid; the main character, Vanyel, spends most of the book wallowing in self-indulgent pity. The philosophy is the type of juvenile, high-sounding metaphysical nonsense that's so very popular in certain fantasy circles right now. Unfortunately, even those parts of the book which move the plot along are so tainted as to be tedious. In fact, "tedious" sums up my opinion of the book quite nicely.

( My full review… )

I slogged through the last half of the book primarily from sheer stubbornness. Fortunately, there was one mostly interesting part to reward me right before the end.

Mercedes Lackey deserves credit for creating a non-stereotypical lead male character. Too bad he's so whiny and self-involved that I was heartily sick of him halfway through the book.

Murder at Avedon Hill by P.G. Holyfield

Arames Kragen is a monk in the Aarronic Order, dedicated to serving the land of Caern. When his travels require passage through a pass controlled by the Avedon family and their small, sequestered town, he is stopped by a recent mysterious murder that no one in Avedon Hill has been able to solve. Brother Arames and his student Aarin begin investigations so that they may complete their journey, but the many-layered web of secrets they uncover soon takes over.

Like Playing for Keeps, Murder at Avedon Hill is a serialized audiobook released through podiobooks.com The book has received many favorable reviews, and was chosen as a Parsec Award finalist* for 2009. Dragon Press has picked it up and will be publishing it later this year. The first episode was released in June 2007; the series was completed back in May.

( More in-depth review… )

So, intriguing story with unexpected plot twists, a well-developed medieval-style setting peopled with interesting characters, and a great cast of voices featuring the top names in geek podcasting. Gotta love it.

Oh, and one more thing: when I reviewed it at iTunes, I commented that the down side to Murder at Avedon Hill was all the promos. Well, the author found my regular blog and actually commented on my most recent post there, letting me know that the feed at podiobooks didn't have the promos. How many people would go to that trouble?

*Best Speculative Fiction Audio Drama (Long Form including Independents)

Part of my 2009 100+ Book Challenge

Stellaluna by Janell Cannon

I don't remember if I mentioned it, but my husband is a media specialist at an elementary school. If you notice lots of children and young adult literature among my reading, that's part of it.

This is an absolutely adorable children's book. I've already decided that I will buy it for my youngest nephew; my sister has always been absolutely nuts about bats, so this one's a must-have for her son. Seven weeks might be a bit young, though…

Stellaluna is a baby fruit bat who is separated from her mom and taken in by a mother bird. Though the little bat's instincts are screaming at her, Momma Bird makes her behave like a baby bird. That means eating worms, sleeping at night, and no hanging by her feet!

Even learning to fly is a challenge for her. She can fly fine, but she can't land like the other birds and her flight is different. One day, she comes across more bats, and everything changes. In the end, Stellaluna is the bridge between the bats and the birds.

It's very sweet and touching, but the coolest part is that the moral of the story is presented very naturally. It's not forced or heavy-handed, which is a refreshing change from much modern children's literature. And it's actually an interesting book that kids would want to read! (Seriously, you would not believe some of the books the teachers requested last year; no child would ever voluntarily read them!)

I can't wait until I can buy it for my nephew!

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

I like to be informed about what's going on in the scifi-fantasy community. Everyone knew about Twilight, but few of my friends would recommend it. Besides, my husband is a school media specialist who doesn't have nearly enough time to read all the children's and young adult books that are popular, so I've been stepping in.

I don't think Twilight, at least, was a waste of my time; it was an enjoyable enough read. However, unlike most series, I don't expect to ever re-read it. I'm going to try to keep my review fairly short and to the point, to make it more useful.

On to Twilight...

The first book was definitely the best book in the series. As I said, it had enough interesting minor characters and plot points to keep me reading. I found some of the twists they gave the vampire myth intriguing, but more on that later.

But Bella and Edward are two of the most uninteresting characters I've read in a while! Bella is so whiny, and that martyr complex gets really annoying. Edward's tortured emo attitude almost makes you hope the tracker vamp gets interested in him instead, so you can move on to a hero more deserving of all those words.
( Click here for the rest… )

Overall, though, the plot kept me interested, as well as the better-developed minor characters (like Alice and Jacob). If not for the ridiculous sparkly vamps and two-dimensional main characters, I think I could have liked it.

But that is a big if…

Sorcery and Cecelia, or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot
by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer

I can't remember the last time I enjoyed a new book more! Sorcery and Cecelia is set in a Regency-era England where magic is real and magicians live openly alongside the regular people.

Cecelia and Kate are cousins from an upper-class family. Kate is spending her first Season in London, while Cecelia is left behind in the country. At the College of Magic, Kate stumbles into a magical intrigue through a case of mistaken identity. Back home, Cecy notices strange things happening among their neighbors. Through their correspondence, they discover that their mysteries are linked.

( Click here for the meat of the review )

The result is a fascinating book with intelligent, appealing characters and a compelling plot. Definitely a thumbs up!

Playing for Keeps by Mur Lafferty

Please note: Playing for Keeps contains generous amounts of profanity. I finally decided that it was worth listening to anyway, but it still bugs me. If you're sensitive to it, think about it before you decide to listen. On to the review…

I'm iffy on superhero stuff. I love the modern Spiderman and X-Men movies, as well as those cartoons from the nineties. I'm also a fan of The Tick, both live action and animated. The Incredibles was, well, incredible. The Ironman movie was interesting, if not stellar, and so were the Fantastic Four films.

But that's about the limits of my superhero interests.

But there is something engaging about Mur Lafferty's Playing for Keeps. I've listened to it twice since it was finished last year. (I left out that it's a free chapterized podcast book from podiobooks.com, which is now also available as a paperback novel and an ebook.)

( Click here for the meat of the review )

My only wish: Stop The Profanity!