Beth The Vampire's Reviews > Feed

This was another book I had to read for my Writing for Young Adult course this semester.

I don't know where to start with this book. The ideas were fantastic, but the writing was really strange and I couldn't really get into it. The concept of the feed is that it is installed in your brain as a child and it essentially feeds you adverts, online shopping, tv shows, and games 24 hours a day seven days a week, and all in front of your eyes. It is not only a great comment on youth culture and materialism, but it shows the gradual progression to humans becoming dependent on corporations and value is placed on our lives depending on whether we are considered a profitable investment.

I don't know when they first had feeds. Like Maybe, fifty or a hundred years ago. Before that, they had to use their hands and their eyes. Computers were all outside the body. they carried them around outside of them, in their hands, like if you carried your lungs in a briefcase and opened it to breathe.

Little emphasis is placed on the wider wold, but it appears to be a world that is quickly dying. Everyone seems to have a lesion on their body (which become quite fashionable after the celebrities appear with one), begin losing their skin and hair towards the end, live above the clouds in bubbles that regulate the weather, and to even get close to the ocean you need to wear a radioactive suit. But I guess this wasn't the point of the book though.

On a trip to the moon Titus meets Violet, who has come alone wanting to having a normal adolescent experience, and Titus, thinking that she is pretty, decides to take her along with his friends. While at a club they are confronted by a man who takes over their feeds, and they are all detained in a hospital so it can be determined whether their feeds have been corrupted. They are soon released and return home, with titus continuing to see Violet, but things become complicated when Violet finds out that her feed is malfunctioning, and slowly killing her. Titus is caught between wanting to continue with his innocent, yet ignorant, life, and spending time with Violet, the little that she has left.

As a character, Titus was a jerk. Flat out wanker. The way he treated Violet towards the end was no short of despicable, and he can apologise all he wants, but she is the one lying in a bed not being able to move while her brain is slowly dying bit by bit. I don't feel like he grew at all during the book, and will likely go back to being the same mainstream guy. Maybe it's because I'm an adult that I find his behaviour despicable, and as an adolescent you don't want to think about being with someone forever and one day dying. Still, it was happening to her, and the least he could have done is not been so fucking selfish.

The writing was filled with a lot of 'dudes,' 'mega,' and calling each other 'unit.' It was very simple and easy to read, but I just didn't like the way it flowed. At about half way I was starting to get really irritated by it. I don't mind it in speech, but in the narrative as well, not so much. Just because people talk with a lot of 'likes' doesn't mean the exposition has to be full of them as well. So while this very character based story did have its interesting moments, there was a lot left to be desired from my perspective in terms of world building, and the way the story was told.