Feed by M. T. Anderson

This satire offers a thought-provoking and scathing indictment that may prod readers to examine the more sinister possibilities of corporate- and media-dominated culture. - PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (starred review) For Titus and his friends, it started out like any ordinary trip to the moon - a chance to party during spring break and play with some stupid low-grav at the Ricochet Lounge. But that was before the crazy hacker caused all their feeds to malfunction, sending them to the hospital to lie around with nothing inside their heads for days. And it was before Titus met Violet, a beautiful, brainy teenage girl who has decided to fight the feed and its omnipresent ability to categorize human thoughts and desires. Following in the footsteps of George Orwell, Anthony Burgess, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr., M. T. Anderson has created a not-so-brave new world - and a smart, savage satire that has captivated readers with its view of an imagined future that veers unnervingly close to the here and now. Editorial Reviews Review Subversive, vigorously conceived, painfully situated at the juncture where funny crosses into tragic, FEED demonstrates that young-adult novels are alive and well and able to deliver a jolt. -New York Times Another book that can be added to the list entitled 'YA Novels I'd Never Heard of But Which Turn Out to Be Modern Classics' and Feed may well turn out to be the best of the lot . . . Funny, serious, sad, superbly realized. -Nick Hornby, The Believer M.T. Anderson has created the perfect device for an ingenious satire of corporate America and our present-day value system...Like those in a funhouse mirror, the reflections the novel shows us may be ugly and distorted, but they are undeniably ourselves. -The Horn Book (starred review) The crystalline realization of this wildly dystopic future carries in it obvious and enormous implications for today's readers - satire at its finest. -Kirkus Reviews (starred review) This satire offers a thought-provoking and scathing indictment that may prod readers to examine the more sinister possibilities of corporate-and media-dominated culture. -Publishers Weekly (starred review) What really puts the teeth in the bite...is Anderson's brillinat satiric vision in the semaless creation of this imagined but believable world. The writing is relentlessly funny, clever in its observations and characters.... -Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books (starred review) A gripping, intriguing, and unique cautionary novel. -School Library Journal Many teens will feel a haunting familiarity about this future universe. -Booklist Both hilarious and disturbing. -Booklist Editors' Choice In spite of its foreboding overtones, FEED is in a sense an optimistic novel. By involving its readers in the act it suggests is central to society's survival, the book offers hope. -Riverbank Review Although set in the future, Anderson's novel is a stunning indictment of contemporary America and its ever-increasing obsession with consumerism even in the face of impending environmental collapse . . . the novel is both intense and grim. It should, however, appeal strongly to mature and thoughtful readers who care about the future of their world. -VOYA Disturbing yet wickedly funny, with as brilliant a use of decayed language as Russell Hoban's post-apocalyptic RIDDLEY WALKER. -Horn Book Fanfare, The This dystopic vision is dark but quite believable. Sad and strong and scary. -Chicago Tribune The book is fast, shrewd, slang-filled and surprisingly engaging. -New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year This wickedly funny and thought-provoking novel is written in a slang so hip it is spoken only by the characters in this book. Teens will want to read it at least twice. -Miami Herald A darkly comic satire that can be read as a promise or a warning. -Detroit Free Press The flashes of humor as well as the cleverly imagined grim future world should quickly draw readers into this look at teenage love and loss, and at consumerism carried to its logical extreme. -Kliatt Book Review The scariest part of FEED's brilliantly conceived futuristic dystopia is that much of it isn't futuristic . . . To list all the prescient details in this novel would require taking something from nearly every page. -Riverbank Review Frightening in its realistic depiction of what is possible in a culture addicted to information, this novel is a guaranteed conversation-starter. -Publishers Weekly Best Children's Books of the Year It's exhilarating to decipher Anderson's futuristic adolescent slang, but his story is a serious one. He has an uncanny gift for depicting how teenagers see the world. -BookPage This language sets a perfect tone for the story of a teenage boy growing up in a frighteningly futuristic world . . . The scariest thing of all is its unnerving plausibility. -Raleigh News and Observer Surely one of the most prescient novels of last 20 years. -Lev Grossman As with the best futuristic fiction, it's scary how little needs to be exaggerated. -Newsday The novel is chilling in the way only a well crafted and darkly writ satire can be. -DigBoston com 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'? Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. It was maybe, okay, maybe it was like two days after the party with the never pukes when he chugalugs that Violet chatted me first thing in the morning and said she was working on a brand-new project. I asked her what was the old project, and she was like, did I want to see the new one? I said, Okay, should I come over to su casa? I've never been there, and she was like, No, not yet. Let's meet at the mall. I was like, Okay, sure, fine, whatever swings your string, and she was all, Babycakes, you swing my string, which is a nice thing for someone to say to you, especially before you use mouthwash. So I flew over to the mall near her house through the rain, which was coming down outside in this really hard way. Everyone had on all their lights until they got above the clouds. Up there it was sunny, and people were flying very businesslike. The mall was really busy, there were a lot of crowds there. They were buying all this stuff, like the inflatable houses for their kids, and the dog massagers, and the tooth extensions that people were wearing, the white ones which you slid over your real teeth and they made your mouth just like one big single tooth going all the way across. Violet was standing near the fountain and she had a real low shirt on, to show off her lesion, because the stars of the Oh? Wow! Thing! had started to get lesions, so now people were thinking better about lesions, and lesions even looked kind of cool. Violet looked great in her low shirt, and besides that she was smiling, and really excited for her idea. For a second we said hello and just laughed about all of the stupid things people were buying and then Violet, she pointed out that, regarding legs to stand on, I didn't have very much of one, because I was wheeling around a wheelbarrow full of a giant hot cross bun from Bun in a Barrow. I said, Yum, yum, yum. She was like, You ready? I asked her what the idea was. She said, Look around you. I did. It was the mall. She said, Listen to me. I listened. She said, I was sitting at the feed doctor's a few days ago, and I started to think about things. Okay. All right. Everything we do gets thrown into a big calculation. Like they're watching us right now. They can tell where you're looking. They want to know what you want. It's a mall, I said. They're also waiting to make you want things. Everything we've grown up with - the stories on the feed, the games, all of that - it's all streamlining our personalities so we're easier to sell to. I mean, they do these demographic studies that divide everyone up into a few personality types, and then you get ads based on what you're supposedly like. They try to figure out who you are, and to make you conform to one of their types for easy marketing. It's like a spiral: They keep making everything more basic so it will appeal to everyone. And gradually, everyone gets used to everything being basic, so we get less and less varied as people, more simple. So the corps make everything even simpler. And it goes on and on. This was the kind of thing people talked about a lot, like, parents were going on about how toys were stupid now, when they used to be good, and how everything on the feed had its price, and okay, it might be true, but it's also boring, so I was like, Yeah. Okay. That's the feed. So what? This is my project. Is . . . ? She smiled and put her finger inside the collar of my shirt. Listen, she said. What I'm doing, what I've been doing over the feed for the last two days, is trying to create a customer profile that's so screwed, no one can market to it. I'm not going to let them catalog me. I'm going to become invisible. I stared at her for a minute. She ran her finger along the edge of my collar, so her nail touched the skin of my throat. I waited for an explanation. She didn't tell me any more, but she said to come with her, and she grabbed one of the nodules on my shirt - it was one of those nodule shirts - and she led me toward Bebrekker & Karl. We went into the store, and immediately our feeds were all completely Bebrekker & Karl. We were bannered with all this crazy high-tech fun stuff they sold there. Then a guy walked up to us and said could he help us. I said I didn't know. But Violet was like, Sure. Do you have those big searchlights? I mean, the really strong ones? Yeah, he said. We have . . . yeah. We have those. He went over to some rack, and he took these big searchlights off the rack. He showed us some different models. The feeds had specs. They showed us the specs while he talked. When he went into the back to get another, cheaper searchlight, I said to Violet, What next? She whispered, Complicating. Resisting. Bebrekker & Karl were bannering us big. It was, We've streamlined the Tesla coil for personal use - you can even wear it in your hair! With these new, da da da, and Relax, yawn, and slump! While our greased cybermassage beads travel up and down your back! Guaranteed to make you etc., like that. I was like, Okay, huh? but the guy came back and he had another searchlight. He told us, You can see shit real good with this one? I have one of these on my upcar. It's sometimes like - whoa, really - whoa. There was this one time? And I was flying along at night and I shined the light down at the ground, to look at the tops of all the suburb pods? And all over the top of them, it looked like it was moving, like there was a black goo? So I turned up the brightness, and I went down, and I shined it more bright, and it turned out the black moving goo was all these hordes of cockroaches. There were miles of them, running all over the tops of the domes. . . .