Here’s another YA novel with an interesting concept, but less than stellar execution.
“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.”
Feed takes place sometime in the future, with flying cars and Spring Break on the moon. The title refers to the feed that everyone (well, almost everyone) has implanted at birth. It’s basically like a smartphone shoved directly into your brain — users received advertising for nearby businesses, stream music and chat with friends. The brain implant also lets users intentionally malfunction, which basically acts like dropping acid — everything goes real weird for a while. Titus and his friends fully embrace this technology, and use it to party as much as possible. Until Titus meets a girl on the moon — Violet — who didn’t have hers implanted until she was older, and was raised by people who never received the implants. Titus is just getting a glimpse of what life is like for Violet when their feeds get hacked at a club, causing major repercussions for them all.
Feed’s universe fascinated me, but the teenage slang in it made me crazy (similar to actual teenage slang, unfortunately). It felt like the author was trying to create his own language, like in A Clockwork Orange, but it falls short. And while the initial set up was pretty cool, nothing ever really happens. I just feel like a lot more could have been done with such a neat idea.
That’s how I felt about this book. I liked it but there were times that the teenage slang about did me in. Great review!