This was a very interesting concept that was hampered by unsympathetic protagonists and, heightened for me since I listened to the audio book, excruciatingly dialog. Everything was ‘meg brag’ or ‘like, da da da’ and they referred to each other as ‘Unit.’ The language made sense since this was basically Idiocracy with better technology but it was just painful to listen to what our world is realistically devolving into…
Titus in an upper middle class kid who goes to the Moon on vacation with his friends during Spring Break. He meets this girl, Violet, and they all go to a night club where a protester/ hacker attacks their group. See, in the future, everyone has “Feeds” that are directly implanted into the brain which are basically smartphones, advertising algorithms with built in PayPal sprinkled with Google Glass put on steroids then intertwined with your central nervous system. Anyway, the hacker disrupts Titus, Violet and their friends’ Feeds and they are temporarily put offline.
“The natural world is so adaptable…So adaptable you wonder what’s natural.”
There is a love story between Titus and Violet but she is pretentious and he is a self obsessed, semi-functioning moron so it’s hard to be invested. Violet was raised by people who grew up without Feeds and didn’t believe in the hyper-material system the world has become; because of this she got her Feed as a young child (not an infant like most everyone else) making her Feed more susceptible to corruption and damage. The hacker’s damage ends up being worse for Violet than Titus and they have to decide what her prognosis means for their future.
2.5 stars rounded down because my ears still hurt from the cutaways to the commercials. Seriously, if the concept sounds interesting to you do not get the audiobook!
I read this a couple of years ago and liked it more than you, but I read the print version rather than the audio version, so I was able to kind of skim the super annoying futuristic teen speak.
Not so sure that I would have been able to listen to that.
It was an interesting concept, but I wanted to throttle most of the characters.
Yeah, I wonder if I would have liked it more if I could have skimmed some parts but I didn’t like it enough to seek out a hard copy and try again haha, oh well!
I have a hard copy (or did — I might have sold it back to HPB). Dialogue still made me crazy.