Title: Feed
Series: Newsflesh Trilogy
Author: Mira Grant
Published: 2010 by Orbit
Pages: 571 pages
Status: First reading, July, 2012
Genre: Science fiction, near future, political thriller, zombies, dystopia, post zombie apocalypse
I don’t like zombies, I really don’t. Apparently unless it is Mira Grant who writes them. I think this works for me because it isn’t a horror book, it is a political thriller, which is actually right up my alley.
If you wanna read what the book is about, go read the blurb.
I really like that this book is told by a rather unreliable narrator who isn’t all that likeable at first. She isn’t a person you would instantly like, but I don’t think many people in Feed’s world really is. They all seem rather wacky really. No wonder with the world they live in.
The world building is one of the things I really like in the Newsflesh Trilogy. It is near future enough that the technology isn’t totally crazy but the world itself has changed immensely. It is a world driven by fear, and with fairly reasonable reasons. There is zombies everywhere for crying out loud. But the fear has been allowed, perhaps even stirred so that it controls everything. If people are afraid enough, they do not really think. If they do not think but just react, they are way easier to control.
The book was originally written in 2006 which shows in a bit of the world building around bloggers. That does feel a bit dated, but the rest of it does not feel out-of-place at all.
The book had me staying up till early in the morning forcing me to keep turning the pages and I was totally glued to it. It also had me laughing and crying a bit. I am pretty sure there are parts of the book that are quite tear-stained.
I have to say that a lot of the book makes a lot more sense once you have read the two next books and the characters become a lot more sympathetic as we go along. Plus there is a crazy scientist with a huge dog and an octopus in one of the later books that you will not get if you don’t read the other two books, so do that!
I can wholeheartedly recommend the series and have done so to quite a few of my friends.