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 under the cut! )

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.

I feel like I start book reviews quite a lot with "one of the things I love most is" . . . but I can't help it! There are lots of things I love! And one of the things I love most, along with all the other things I love, is a good genre-cross. Give me a good mystery WITH HOBBITS or a comedy of manners IN SPACE and I am happy as a very pleased clam.

Seanan McGuire's Rosemary and Rue is an excellent example of this - a genuine noir urban fantasy novel. It even takes place in California! (Everyone knows that all the best noir takes place in either LA or San Francisco. It is just one of those things.) October 'Toby' Daye is a hard-boiled San Francisco private eye who happens to be a half-Fae changeling, which comes with a few benefits and a lot more inconveniences. Something that I won't spoil, because it took me by total surprise and I think the surprise is worth it, happens at the end of the first chapter that causes her to try and isolate herself completely from the supernatural world. When she's called in to investigate the murder of an old friend, she has to get in touch with all her old contacts to try to find the answer before TIME RUNS OUT.

One of the key elements of noir is the sense of a world that is fundamentally wrong and unjust, with the lower-class characters, protagonist included, struggling to get by with the deck stacked against them. In this book, it's the class issues between full fairy creatures and changelings that provide the necessary backdrop for a noir story to play out, which I thought was an incredibly cool way to meld the two genres. There are other nice plays on the noir genre too - instead of femme fatales, there are dude fatales (I was wrong on which one was going to turn out evil, but I hold out hope that my suspicions about the other one will come true in a later book!), there's a high-speed car chase over the Golden Gate Bridge, there are Tough Kids In Over Their Heads and High-Class Families Hiding Complicated Family Secrets, and, in short, in my fantasy casting, someone would be played by Lauren Bacall.

The supernatural worldbuilding itself did not excite me particularly - it's your standard almost-entirely-European mix of fairy creatures (Sidhe, undines, selkies, etc.) with a few choices that I found a bit perplexing and potentially problematic (the German-mythology-based undine is Japanese, for no given reason, while the one fairy creature that comes from non-European mythology, a kitsune, seems to be white). I also had a really hard time taking "oak and ash!" seriously as a swear word. This aside, though, I enjoyed the book a ton, and I am totally looking forward to the next one, which comes out I think in March?

I also know there are a bunch of you on my flist who are urban fantasy fans, so if you are looking for a fun mystery-fantasy read that is high on the awesome noir tropes and low on the completely gratuitous sex (coughLaurellKHamiltoncough), maybe give this a go! (Feel free to defend other urban fantasy to me in the comments, too.)