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[skygiants]

wickedtrue lent me Mira Grant's Feed a few months back and then I took an embarrassing age to get around to reading it and getting it back to her, which is probably the reason there is not at least one more awesome Feed fic in this year's Yuletide archive. This is the world's loss and I will accept my just blame.

ANYWAY. First of all, what you may already know about Feed: it's a book about blogging!

Okay, what you more likely already knew is that it's a book about zombies, except it's not, really, which is one of its strongest points: it is, very explicitly, a story about a world that contains zombies, but it is not a story about zombies. Because when it comes down to it there's only so many stories about zombies you can tell (they want to eat you! They used to be people! It's very sad! You scream and run away, or shoot their heads in, or both, until you are dead or there are no more zombies), but there's an infinite number of stories you can tell about worlds that happen to have zombies in, which is probably why X With Zombies is so popular. (For example, areyoumymemmy's An Inside Look At a Main Line Society Apocalypse is a story about socialites and witty banter in a world that happens to have zombies in, which is why it's so much fun. Yes, I did just sneak a Yuletide rec into my book review. Deal with it.)

Anyway, this particular story is about a couple of bloggers who are invited to accompany a presidential candidate on a campaign trail, and then there are conspiracies and assassination attempts and so on, in a world that has adjusted to the fact that there are zombies now and we just have to live with it. The worldbuilding is detailed and thoughtful and the characters are cool - something I haven't seen dealt with much in reviews that I found especially interesting is the fact that the protagonist, news-blogger Georgia "George" Mason, has a retinal disability of the kind that entails numerous petty annoyances in her day-to-day-life, which I thought was handled really well. It's also very fast-paced, and overall, I really liked it; in fact, directly after I finished it I bought a copy to shove into the hands of my zombie-loving poli-sci major little brother.

There were, however, a few things that bothered me slightly more than nitpicks. Some are spoilery and I will complain about them here!

1.) Okay, this one actually is a nitpick, but it still bothered me! If we're getting a first-person story I do like some admittance of unreliable narrator, but it's cool that we're apparently expected to take Georgia at her word. HOWEVER. For a woman who keeps telling us how much she is a straight-up news reporter, and all she does is news with as little bias as possible and a VERY OCCASIONAL op/ed, I did find it kind of weird that every single one of her framing newsblog clips is a blatant op/ed. It made it harder for me to trust that she did what we were constantly told she did in her writing, because we were never shown it.

2.) Speaking of unreliable narrators: I kept waiting for Georgia and Shaun to be revealed as unreliable re: their parents, or at least for the parents to be complicated up a bit, and I was pretty disappointed that the end the parents were just as completely shallow and uncaring as we'd been told they were all along. They can still be terrible selfish parents while having some human emotions! There's still time for this to evolve in later books, I guess, but I'm not holding my breath.

3.) Man, guys, was it really necessary for Governor Tate to be that much of an EVIL EVIL REPUBLICAN? He even monologues! (I would give more points for Ryman being a friendly and sympathetic Republican if everything we heard about his political position didn't make him sound exactly like a liberal moderate anyway; I would give more points for Buffy being a friendly and sympathetic person of religious convictions if, uh, well. Yeah.)

ALL THESE THINGS BEING SAID, I still would recommend the book and will definitely be reading the next in the trilogy; I also think it's a more ambitious book than the October Daye books Grant writes as Seanan McGuire, which is probably why its flaws bothered me more.

Comments

[skygiants]

(HAHAHA ME TOO. It is so accurate! Every so often I would pause to wonder how much news mileage, exactly, could be gotten from wandering out to poke zombies, and then remembered their namesake and decided probably infinite.)