Feed - Softcover

Anderson, M T

3.55

64,027 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 074459085X ISBN 13: 9780744590852

Publisher: Walker Childrens Paperbacks, 2003

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Titus doesn't think much of the moon. But then Titus doesn't think much at all. He's got his "feed" - an Internet implant linked to his brain - to do his thinking for him. It tells him where to party or get the best bargains and how to accessorize the mysterious lesions everyone's been getting.

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Review:

This brilliantly ironic satire is set in a future world where television and computers are connected directly into people's brains when they are babies. The result is a chillingly recognizable consumer society where empty-headed kids are driven by fashion and shopping and the avid pursuit of silly entertainment--even on trips to Mars and the moon--and by constant customized murmurs in their brains of encouragement to buy, buy, buy.

Anderson gives us this world through the voice of a boy who, like everyone around him, is almost completely inarticulate, whose vocabulary, in a dead-on parody of the worst teenspeak, depends heavily on three words: "like," "thing," and the second most common English obscenity. He's even made this vapid kid a bit sympathetic, as a product of his society who dimly knows something is missing in his head. The details are bitterly funny--the idiotic but wildly popular sitcom called "Oh? Wow! Thing!", the girls who have to retire to the ladies room a couple of times an evening because hairstyles have changed, the hideous lesions on everyone that are not only accepted, but turned into a fashion statement. And the ultimate awfulness is that when we finally meet the boy's parents, they are just as inarticulate and empty-headed as he is, and their solution to their son's problem is to buy him an expensive car.

Although there is a danger that at first teens may see the idea of brain-computers as cool, ultimately they will recognize this as a fascinating novel that says something important about their world. (Ages 14 and older) --Patty Campbell

About the Author:

M. T. Anderson is on the faculty of Vermont College’s MFA Program in Writing for Children. He is the author of the novels THIRSTY and BURGER WUSS and the picture-book biography HANDEL, WHO KNEW WHAT HE LIKED. He says of FEED, "To write this novel, I read a huge number of magazines like SEVENTEEN, MAXIM, and STUFF. I eavesdropped on conversations in malls, especially when people were shouting into cell phones. Where else could you get lines like, ‘Dude, I think the truffle is totally undervalued’?"

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