28. Feed by M. T. Anderson

Feed by M. T. Anderson
ISBN: 0763622591
Candlewick, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2004
273 pages

Teaser: If you spent your whole life listening to non-stop advertisements, courtesy of an internet-like "feed" wired directly into your brain, would you ever have a thought of your own?

Summary: I think the main character, Titus, manages to summarize this book better than I could: It's about the feed. It's about this meg normal guy, who doesn't think about anything until one wacky day, when he meets a dissident with a heart of gold. Set against the backdrop of America in its final days, it's the high-spirited story of their love together, it's laugh-out-loud funny, really heartwarming, and a visual feast. Together, the two crazy kids grow, have madcap escapades, and learn an important lesson about love. They learn to resist the feed. Rated PG-13. For language and mild sexual situations. (p. 234, dialog only).

Evaluation: I was a bit stunned by the world laid out in Feed. The voice it was told in was generally simplistic, with sentences that were either very short, or very long and rambling. I think this really helped to show the readers just how limited the speech patterns of the population have become in this world of constant advertizing. Violet's comparitavely complex voice stands out from the crowd, a legacy of her late feed implantation. With seven years to develop a working brain before being bombarded by the feed, Violet is capable of more complex thoughts and speech. It isn't quite as obvious that Titus is also somewhat advanced, but as Violet herself notes Titus is "the only one of them that uses metaphor," (p. 52).

Even more frightening than the clumsy decay of language is the fairly rapid decay of the people, who don't even care. People are developing lesions all over, and rather than be frightened of the strange development, they decide the sores are fashion statements, even going so far as to get fake lesions surgically created. Little commercial-like moments in the book hint at a coming calamity, an end of society, or at least the country, looming near, and no one but Violet even notices. Hidden under the stunted prose the world of Feed is a creepy and intriguing read.

Challenge issues and age recommendation: Sex, alcohol, death and dying, and some fairly gross sores are all present in Feed. The decay of humanity could be a rather difficult topic for some to handle as well. Overall, I'll nudge Titus' rating up just a touch, and recommend this book for readers 14 and up.